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An Error Bound for Aggregation in Approximate Dynamic Programming

Published: July 2, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2507.01324v1

By: Yuchao Li, Dimitri Bertsekas

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers learn better by simplifying problems.

Business Areas:
A/B Testing Data and Analytics

We consider a general aggregation framework for discounted finite-state infinite horizon dynamic programming (DP) problems. It defines an aggregate problem whose optimal cost function can be obtained off-line by exact DP and then used as a terminal cost approximation for an on-line reinforcement learning (RL) scheme. We derive a bound on the error between the optimal cost functions of the aggregate problem and the original problem. This bound was first derived by Tsitsiklis and van Roy [TvR96] for the special case of hard aggregation. Our bound is similar but applies far more broadly, including to soft aggregation and feature-based aggregation schemes.

Page Count
10 pages

Category
Mathematics:
Optimization and Control