Markov Decision Process (MDP) Toolbox for Python¶

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The MDP toolbox provides classes and functions for the resolution of descrete-time Markov Decision Processes. The list of algorithms that have been implemented includes backwards induction, linear programming, policy iteration, q-learning and value iteration along with several variations.

The classes and functions were developped based on the MATLAB MDP toolbox by the Biometry and Artificial Intelligence Unit of INRA Toulouse (France). There are editions available for MATLAB, GNU Octave, Scilab and R. The suite of MDP toolboxes are described in Chades I, Chapron G, Cros M-J, Garcia F & Sabbadin R (2014) ‘MDPtoolbox: a multi-platform toolbox to solve stochastic dynamic programming problems’, Ecography, vol. 37, no. 9, pp. 916–920, doi 10.1111/ecog.00888.

Features¶

Eight MDP algorithms implemented

Fast array manipulation using NumPy

Full sparse matrix support using SciPy’s sparse package

Optional linear programming support using cvxopt

Documentation¶

Documentation is available as docstrings in the module code.

Installation¶

NumPy and SciPy must be on your system to use of this toolbox. Please have a look at their documentation to get them installed. If you are installing onto Ubuntu or Debian and using Python 2 then this will pull in all the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install python-numpy python-scipy python-cvxopt

On the other hand, if you are using Python 3 then cvxopt will have to be compiled (pip will do it automatically). To get NumPy, SciPy and all the dependencies to have a fully featured cvxopt then run:

sudo apt-get install python3-numpy python3-scipy liblapack-dev libatlas-base-dev libgsl0-dev fftw-dev libglpk-dev libdsdp-dev

I recommend using pip to install the toolbox if you have it available. Just type

pip install pymdptoolbox

at the console and it should take care of downloading and installing everything for you. If you also want cvxopt to be automatically downloaded and installed so that you can solve MDPs using linear programming then type:

pip install "pymdptoolbox[LP]"

If you want it to be installed just for you rather than system wide then do

pip install --user pymdptoolbox

Otherwise, you can download the package manually from the web

Download the latest stable release from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pymdptoolbox or clone the Git repository

git clone https://github.com/sawcordwell/pymdptoolbox.git

If you downloaded the *.zip or *.tar.gz archive, then extract it

tar -xzvf pymdptoolbox-<VERSION>.tar.gz

unzip pymdptoolbox-<VERSION>

Change to the PyMDPtoolbox directory

cd pymdptoolbox

Install via Setuptools, either to the root filesystem or to your home directory if you don’t have administrative access.

python setup.py install

python setup.py install --user

Read the Setuptools documentation for more advanced information.

Quick Use¶

Start Python in your favourite way. The following example shows you how to import the module, set up an example Markov decision problem using a discount value of 0.9, solve it using the value iteration algorithm, and then check the optimal policy.

import mdptoolbox.example
P, R = mdptoolbox.example.forest()
vi = mdptoolbox.mdp.ValueIteration(P, R, 0.9)
vi.run()
vi.policy # result is (0, 0, 0)

Contribute¶

Issue Tracker: https://github.com/sawcordwell/pymdptoolbox/issues

Source Code: https://github.com/sawcordwell/pymdptoolbox

Support¶

Use the issue tracker.

License¶

The project is licensed under the BSD license. See LICENSE.txt for details.