Inc Prun - review

From: Tal Shaked (tshaked_at_u.washington.edu)
Date: Fri May 09 2003 - 10:57:53 PDT

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    Incremental Pruning: A Simple, Fast, Exact Method for Partially Observable
    Markov Decision Process – Cassandra, Littman, Zhang

    This paper looks at some aspects and variations of incremental pruning for
    solving POMDPs, compares them to other algorithms, and provides analysis and
    empirical results arguing that it is currently the best method.

    The most important ideas are contained somewhere between the second column
    of page two and the end of page five, but I didn’t understand these parts or
    know the background to make much sense out of it. It seems that at some
    point they have an equation that is conceptually simpler and has better
    performance than what is used in the witness algorithm. They then show that
    although the worst-case complexities are the same for both algorithms in the
    number of linear programs and constraints, the best case is asymptotically
    better than the witness algorithm.

    There did not seem to be much of a motivation section. The background
    seemed insufficient for a reader who is not very familiar with the problems,
    current algorithms, and the standard notation.

    I’m not sure about current research directions since I don’t have much
    intuition of the problem, current solutions, and which areas can be
    improved.


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