Decision Making

The area of decision making and control involves selecting among several different courses of action. The available actions can be:

• Discrete:
  • finite number;
  • infinite number;
• Continuous:
  • infinite number.

The decisions themselves can be:

• One-time: a single decision with different possible outcomes;
• Sequential: a sequence of decisions affecting the state of the same environment; a.k.a. discrete or continuous control.

The problem can be:

• Contextual: the agent making the decisions is given some kind of context – an observation of the current state that it bases it’s decision on;

Context-free: there is no context/observation for the decision – we are trying to pick an action that works best overall.