{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"The Value of Observation for Monitoring Dynamic Systems","authors":[{"name":"Eyal Even-Dar","slug":"eyal-even-dar","given":"Eyal","family":"Even-Dar","affiliation":""},{"name":"Sham M. Kakade","slug":"sham-m-kakade","given":"Sham M.","family":"Kakade","affiliation":""},{"name":"Yishay Mansour","slug":"yishay-mansour","given":"Yishay","family":"Mansour","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"We consider the fundamental problem of monitoring (i.e. tracking) the belief state in a dynamic system, when the model is only approximately correct and when the initial belief state might be unknown. In this general setting where the model is (perhaps only slightly) mis-specified, monitoring (and consequently planning) may be impossible as errors might accumulate over time. We provide a new characterization, the emph{value of observation}, which allows us to bound the error accumulation. The value of observation is a parameter that governs how much information the observation provides. For instance, in Partially Observable MDPs when it is 1 the POMDP is an MDP while for an unobservable Markov Decision Process the parameter is 0. Thus, the new parameter characterizes a spectrum from MDPs to unobservable MDPs depending on the amount of information conveyed in the observations.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/398","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/0398.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/398.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/bibtex/398","volume":{"slug":"2007","title":"Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2007","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/","year":2007,"location":"Hyderabad, India","dates":"","editors":"Ramon López de Mántaras","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":398,"pages":{"first":2474,"last":2478},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}