Approximate solution of infinite-horizon risk-sensitive Markov decision processes

Infinite-horizon risk-sensitive Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the discounted cost criterion are challenging to solve because the optimal policy may be non- stationary. Existing solution methods reformulate the problem as a continuous-state (risk-neutral) MDP and solve it using state-discretization or value function approximation. Such approaches typically lack explicit stopping conditions or error bounds. In this … Read more

Risk-Sensitive Variational Bayes: Formulations and Bounds

We study data-driven decision-making problems in a parametrized Bayesian framework. We adopt a risk-sensitive approach to modeling the interplay between statistical estimation of parameters and optimization, by computing a risk measure over a loss/disutility function with respect to the posterior distribution over the parameters. While this forms the standard Bayesian decision-theoretic approach, we focus on … Read more