Policy - Definition and Overview

A policy is a plan of action for tackling political issues. It is often initated by a political party in government, which undergoes reforms and changes by interested actors (for example, opposition parties and lobby groups).

In AI planning and reinforcement learning, a policy prescribes a non-empty deliberation (sequence of actions) given a non-empty sequence of states.

Types of policy include:

• stationary (resp. non-stationary)
• deterministic (resp. stochastic, randomized and sometimes non-deterministic)
• memoryless (e.g. non-stationary)
• causal (resp. non-causal)
• index
• opportunistic (resp. non-opportunistic)

These qualifiers can be combined, so for example you could have a stationary-memoryless-index policy.