Generalized Emphatic Temporal Difference Learning: Bias-Variance Analysis
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We consider the off-policy evaluation problem in Markov decision processes with function approximation. We propose a generalization of the recently introduced emphatic temporal differences (ETD) algorithm SuttonMW15, which encompasses the original ETD(λ), as well as several other off-policy evaluation algorithms as special cases. We call this framework , where our introduced parameter β controls the decay rate of an importance-sampling term. We study conditions under which the projected fixed-point equation underlying involves a contraction operator, allowing us to present the first asymptotic error bounds (bias) for . Our results show that the original ETD algorithm always involves a contraction operator, and its bias is bounded. Moreover, by controlling β, our proposed generalization allows trading-off bias for variance reduction, thereby achieving a lower total error.
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