Deciproject Valuation And Decision Making Under Risk Ans Uncertainty

This book describes new techniques for making decisions in situations with uncertainty and new applications of decision-making techniques.

This book presents recent research in decision making under uncertainty, in particular reinforcement learning and learning with expert advice. The core elements of decision theory, Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning have not been previously collected in a concise volume. Our aim with this book was to provide a solid theoretical foundation with elementary proofs of the most important theorems in the field, all collected in one place, and not typically found in
introductory textbooks. This book is addressed to graduate students that are interested in statistical decision making under uncertainty and the foundations of reinforcement learning.

This book shows, on numerous examples, how to make decisions in realistic situations when we have both uncertainty and constraints. In most these situations, the book's emphasis is on the why-question, i.e., on a theoretical explanation for empirical formulas and techniques. Such explanations are important: they help understand why these techniques work well in some cases and not so well in others, and thus, help practitioners decide whether a technique is appropriate for a given situation.

Problems, methods and algorithms of decision making based on an uncertain knowledge now create a large and intensively developing area in the field of knowledge-based decision support systems. The main aim of this book is to present a unified, systematic description of analysis and decision problems in a wide class of uncertain systems described by traditional mathematical models and by relational knowledge representations. A part of the book is devoted to new original ideas introduced and developed by the author: the concept of uncertain variables and the idea of a learning process consisting in knowledge validation and updating.