We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest goal of competing with a low-dimensional family of policies. We use the dual linear programming formulation of the MDP average cost problem, in which the variable is a stationary distribution over state-action pairs, and we consider a neighborhood of a low-dimensional subset of the set of stationary distributions (defined in terms of state-action features) as the comparison class. We propose two techniques, one based on stochastic convex optimization, and one based on constraint sampling. In both cases, we give bounds that show that the performance of our algorithms approaches the best achievable by any policy in the comparison class. Most importantly, these results depend on the size of the comparison class, but not on the size of the state space. Preliminary experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in a queuing application.

本文考虑了控制具有大状态空间的马尔可夫决策过程以最小化平均成本的问题，并使用线性规划和两种方法，即基于随机凸优化和基于约束采样的方法，将性能提高到与在低维策略类中的任何策略相比的最佳水平。

大规模马尔可夫决策问题的线性规划