Structural Results for Average‐Cost Inventory Models with Markov‐Modulated Demand and Partial Information
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider a discrete‐time infinite‐horizon inventory system with non‐stationary demand, full backlogging, and deterministic replenishment lead time. Demand arrives according to a probability distribution conditional on the state of the world that undergoes Markovian transitions over time. But the actual state of the world can only be imperfectly estimated based on past demand data. We model the inventory replenishment problem for this system as a Markov decision process (MDP) with an uncountable state space consisting of both the inventory position and the most recent belief, a conditional probability mass function, about the actual state of the world. Assuming that the state of the world evolves as an ergodic Markov chain, using the vanishing discount method along with a coupling argument, we prove the existence of an optimal average cost that is independent of the initial system state. For our linear cost structure, we also establish the average‐cost optimality of a belief‐dependent base‐stock policy. We then discretize the uncountable belief space into a regular grid and observe that the average cost under our discretization converges to the optimal average cost as the number of grid points grows large. Finally, we conduct numerical experiments to evaluate the use of a myopic belief‐dependent base‐stock policy as a heuristic for our MDP with the uncountable state space. On a test bed of 108 instances, the average cost obtained from the myopic policy deviates by no more than a few percent from the best lower bound on the optimal average cost obtained from our discretization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".