Feature Selection for Reinforcement Learning: Evaluating Implicit State-Reward Dependency via Conditional Mutual Information

Abstract

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach to decision making in unknown environments. However, real-world RL tasks often involve high-dimensional state spaces, and then standard RL methods do not perform well. In this paper, we propose a new feature selection framework for coping with high dimensionality. Our proposed framework adopts conditional mutual information between return and state-feature sequences as a feature selection criterion, allowing the evaluation of implicit state-reward dependency. The conditional mutual information is approximated by a least-squares method, which results in a computationally efficient feature selection procedure. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated on grid-world navigation problems.

Cite

Text

Hachiya and Sugiyama. "Feature Selection for Reinforcement Learning: Evaluating Implicit State-Reward Dependency via Conditional Mutual Information." European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, 2010. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15880-3_36

Markdown

[Hachiya and Sugiyama. "Feature Selection for Reinforcement Learning: Evaluating Implicit State-Reward Dependency via Conditional Mutual Information." European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, 2010.](https://mlanthology.org/ecmlpkdd/2010/hachiya2010ecmlpkdd-feature/) doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15880-3_36

BibTeX

@inproceedings{hachiya2010ecmlpkdd-feature,
  title     = {{Feature Selection for Reinforcement Learning: Evaluating Implicit State-Reward Dependency via Conditional Mutual Information}},
  author    = {Hachiya, Hirotaka and Sugiyama, Masashi},
  booktitle = {European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases},
  year      = {2010},
  pages     = {474-489},
  doi       = {10.1007/978-3-642-15880-3_36},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/ecmlpkdd/2010/hachiya2010ecmlpkdd-feature/}
}