There are mainly three meanings of coarsening. First, when we study a very large-scale system, it is unnecessary to focus on the changes of each microscopic state. Coarse-graining filters out noise and heterogeneity to derive mesoscale or macroscopic laws from microscopic data. Second, some state transition probabilities are very similar, so they can be regarded as the same kind of state. Clustering (partitioning) this kind of states (also called lumping the states) to obtain a new smaller Markov chain can reduce the redundancy of system representation. Third, in reinforcement learning using Markov decision processes, coarse-graining the Markov chain can reduce the size of the state space and improve training efficiency. In much of the literature, coarse-graining and dimension reduction are equivalent <ref>Coarse graining. ''Encyclopedia of Mathematics.'' URL: <nowiki>http://encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php?title=Coarse_graining&oldid=16170</nowiki></ref>. | There are mainly three meanings of coarsening. First, when we study a very large-scale system, it is unnecessary to focus on the changes of each microscopic state. Coarse-graining filters out noise and heterogeneity to derive mesoscale or macroscopic laws from microscopic data. Second, some state transition probabilities are very similar, so they can be regarded as the same kind of state. Clustering (partitioning) this kind of states (also called lumping the states) to obtain a new smaller Markov chain can reduce the redundancy of system representation. Third, in reinforcement learning using Markov decision processes, coarse-graining the Markov chain can reduce the size of the state space and improve training efficiency. In much of the literature, coarse-graining and dimension reduction are equivalent <ref>Coarse graining. ''Encyclopedia of Mathematics.'' URL: <nowiki>http://encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php?title=Coarse_graining&oldid=16170</nowiki></ref>. |