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The "Markov" in "Markov decision process" refers to the underlying structure of state transitions that still follow the Markov property. The process is called a "decision process" because it involves making decisions that influence these state transitions, extending the concept of a Markov chain into the realm of decision-making under uncertainty.
Usually the term "Markov chain" is reserved for a process with a discrete set of times, that is, a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC), [11] but a few authors use the term "Markov process" to refer to a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) without explicit mention.
A Markov decision process is a Markov chain in which state transitions depend on the current state and an action vector that is applied to the system. Typically, a Markov decision process is used to compute a policy of actions that will maximize some utility with respect to expected rewards.
A process with this property is said to be Markov or Markovian and known as a Markov process. Two famous classes of Markov process are the Markov chain and Brownian motion. Note that there is a subtle, often overlooked and very important point that is often missed in the plain English statement of the definition. Namely that the statespace of ...
A partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is a generalization of a Markov decision process (MDP). A POMDP models an agent decision process in which it is assumed that the system dynamics are determined by an MDP, but the agent cannot directly observe the underlying state.
A continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) is a continuous stochastic process in which, for each state, the process will change state according to an exponential random variable and then move to a different state as specified by the probabilities of a stochastic matrix. An equivalent formulation describes the process as changing state according to ...
This category is for articles about the theory of Markov chains and processes, and associated processes. See Category:Markov models for models for specific applications that make use of Markov processes.
Figure 1. Probabilistic parameters of a hidden Markov model (example) X — states y — possible observations a — state transition probabilities b — output probabilities. In its discrete form, a hidden Markov process can be visualized as a generalization of the urn problem with replacement (where each item from the urn is returned to the original urn before the next step). [7]