Book Image

Statistics for Machine Learning

By : Pratap Dangeti
Book Image

Statistics for Machine Learning

By: Pratap Dangeti

Overview of this book

Complex statistics in machine learning worry a lot of developers. Knowing statistics helps you build strong machine learning models that are optimized for a given problem statement. This book will teach you all it takes to perform the complex statistical computations that are required for machine learning. You will gain information on the statistics behind supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and more. You will see real-world examples that discuss the statistical side of machine learning and familiarize yourself with it. You will come across programs for performing tasks such as modeling, parameter fitting, regression, classification, density collection, working with vectors, matrices, and more. By the end of the book, you will have mastered the statistics required for machine learning and will be able to apply your new skills to any sort of industry problem.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Reinforcement learning basics


Before we deep dive into the details of reinforcement learning, I would like to cover some of the basics necessary for understanding the various nuts and bolts of RL methodologies. These basics appear across various sections of this chapter, which we will explain in detail whenever required:

  • Environment: This is any system that has states, and mechanisms to transition between states. For example, the environment for a robot is the landscape or facility it operates.
  • Agent: This is an automated system that interacts with the environment.
  • State: The state of the environment or system is the set of variables or features that fully describe the environment.
  • Goal or absorbing state or terminal state: This is the state that provides a higher discounted cumulative reward than any other state. A high cumulative reward prevents the best policy from being dependent on the initial state during training. Whenever an agent reaches its goal, we will finish one episode.
  • Action:...