A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Policy evaluation is a key process in reinforcement learning. It assesses a given policy using estimation of the corresponding value function. When using a parameterized function to approximate the value, it is common to optimize the set of parameters by minimizing the sum of squared Bellman Temporal Differences errors…
New method estimates minimizer and minimum value of a regression function.
problem Estimating minimizer and minimum value of a regression function from noisy data.
method Projected gradient descent with gradient estimated by regularized local polynomial algorithm, followed by a rate optimal nonparametric procedure.
result Achieves minimax optimal rates of convergence for smooth and strongly convex functions.
Randomized trials, also known as A/B tests, are used to select between two policies: a control and a treatment. Given a corresponding set of features, we can ideally learn an optimized policy P that maps the A/B test data features to action space and optimizes reward. However, although A/B testing provides an unbiased …
The problem of pricing Bermudan options using Monte Carlo and a nonparametric regression is considered. We derive optimal non-asymptotic bounds for a lower biased estimate based on the suboptimal stopping rule constructed using some estimates of continuation values. These estimates may be of different nature, they may …
In this paper, we propose a new threshold-kernel jump-detection method for jump-diffusion processes, which iteratively applies thresholding and kernel methods in an approximately optimal way to achieve improved finite-sample performance. We use the expected number of jump misclassifications as the objective function to…
In traditional reinforcement learning, an agent maximizes the reward collected during its interaction with the environment by approximating the optimal policy through the estimation of value functions. Typically, given a state s and action a, the corresponding value is the expected discounted sum of rewards. The optima…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of the generative model, which indicates that for an MDP with N state-action pairs a…
A low rank matrix X has been contaminated by uniformly distributed noise, missing values, outliers and corrupt entries. Reconstruction of X from the singular values and singular vectors of the contaminated matrix Y is a key problem in machine learning, computer vision and data science. In this paper we show that common…
This paper provides a block coordinate descent algorithm to solve unconstrained optimization problems. In our algorithm, computation of function values or gradients is not required. Instead, pairwise comparison of function values is used. Our algorithm consists of two steps; one is the direction estimate step and the o…
Model-free reinforcement learning methods such as the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm (PPO) have successfully applied in complex decision-making problems such as Atari games. However, these methods suffer from high variances and high sample complexity. On the other hand, model-based reinforcement learning method…
POWSS simplifies Q-value estimation in POMDPs with continuous observations.
problem Lack of theoretical justification for online sampling-based algorithms in POMDPs with continuous observation spaces.
method Developed POWSS, a simplified algorithm that estimates Q-values accurately with high probability and can approach optimality with increased computational power.
result POWSS provides formal theoretical guarantees for Q-value estimation in POMDPs with continuous observations.
Iterative procedures for parameter estimation based on stochastic gradient descent allow the estimation to scale to massive data sets. However, in both theory and practice, they suffer from numerical instability. Moreover, they are statistically inefficient as estimators of the true parameter value. To address these tw…