We consider reinforcement learning in partially observable domains where the agent can query an expert for demonstrations. Our nonparametric Bayesian approach combines model knowledge, inferred from expert information and independent exploration, with policy knowledge inferred from expert

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the following: (1) in thinking about prior distributions, we should go beyond Jeffreys’s principles and move toward weakly informative priors; (2) it is natural for those of us who work in social and computational sciences to favor complex models, contra Jeffreys’s preference for simplicity; and (3) a key

Recently there has been a surge in econometric work focusing on estimating average treatment effects under various sets of assumptions. One strand of this literature has developed methods for estimating average treatment effects for a binary treatment under assumptions variously described as exogeneity, unconfoundedness, or selection on observables. The implication of these assumptions is that systematic (for example, average or distributional) differences in outcomes between treated and control units with the same values for the covariates are attributable to the treatment. Recent analysis has considered estimation and inference for average treatment effects under weaker assumptions than typical of the earlier literature by avoiding distributional and functional-form assumptions. Various methods of semiparametric estimation have been proposed, including estimating the unknown regression functions, matching, methods using the propensity score such as weighting and blocking, and combinations of these approaches. In this paper I review the state of this

distribution with a single Gaussian; and using nonparametric kernel density estimation. We observe large reductions in error on several natural and artificial data sets, which suggests that kernel estimation is a useful tool for learning Bayesian models. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Uncertainty

This paper presents a Bayesian method for constructing probabilistic networks from databases. In particular, we focus on constructing Bayesian belief networks. Potential applications include computer-assisted hypothesis testing, automated scientific discovery, and automated construction

to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual

Abstract. We give a basic introduction to Gaussian Process regression models. We focus on understanding the role of the stochastic process and how it is used to define a distribution over functions. We present the simple equations for incorporating training data and examine how to learn

This paper surveys locally weighted learning, a form of lazy learning and memorybased learning, and focuses on locally weighted linear regression. The survey discusses distance functions, smoothing parameters, weighting functions, local model structures, regularization of the estimates and bias

. The decomposition, known as the MAXQ decomposition, has both a procedural semantics---as a subroutine hierarchy---and a declarative semantics---as a representation of the value function of a hierarchical policy. MAXQ unifies and extends previous work on hierarchical reinforcement learning by Singh, Kaelbling