%0 Journal Article %T Central-limit approach to risk-aware Markov decision processes %A Pengqian Yu %A Jia Yuan Yu %A Huan Xu %J Mathematics %D 2015 %I arXiv %X Whereas classical Markov decision processes maximize the expected reward, we consider minimizing the risk. We propose to evaluate the risk associated to a given policy over a long-enough time horizon with the help of a central limit theorem. The proposed approach works whether the transition probabilities are known or not. We also provide a gradient-based policy improvement algorithm that converges to a local optimum of the risk objective. %U http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00583v1