Bayesian Learning of Parametric Mean Field Games with Common Noise

Abstract

We study the inverse problem of recovering unknown parameters governing the dynamics and rewards of Mean Field Games (MFGs) from partial observations of population trajectories, made stochastic by common noise. The observer seeks to recover a consistent parameter $θ$ via Bayesian inference, facing the challenge that evaluating the likelihood requires solving a new Nash equilibrium (NE) for each candidate $θ$. Due to common noise, the mean-field evolution is stochastic and equilibrium policies are population dependent, which makes solving for each parameter computationally expensive. To overcome this, we introduce the Bayesian-Extended Mean Field Game (BE-MFG), whose single NE simultaneously encodes equilibrium policies for all parameters, enabling efficient learning of the conditional density of mean-field trajectories. We formalize parameter consistency and identifiability in MFGs with common noise and investigate conditions under which consistent parameter recovery is guaranteed. On three synthetic environments of various complexity, we recover the ground-truth parameter accurately from a small number of partial, stochastic observations, outperforming an adaptation of inverse reinforcement learning for MFGs. A fourth experiment, on public electricity market data, suggests that the approach can also be applied to real-world data.