Book Image

Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow

By : Sayon Dutta
Book Image

Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow

By: Sayon Dutta

Overview of this book

Reinforcement learning (RL) allows you to develop smart, quick and self-learning systems in your business surroundings. It's an effective method for training learning agents and solving a variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence - from games, self-driving cars and robots, to enterprise applications such as data center energy saving (cooling data centers) and smart warehousing solutions. The book covers major advancements and successes achieved in deep reinforcement learning by synergizing deep neural network architectures with reinforcement learning. You'll also be introduced to the concept of reinforcement learning, its advantages and the reasons why it's gaining so much popularity. You'll explore MDPs, Monte Carlo tree searches, dynamic programming such as policy and value iteration, and temporal difference learning such as Q-learning and SARSA. You will use TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to build simple neural network models that learn from their own actions. You will also see how reinforcement learning algorithms play a role in games, image processing and NLP. By the end of this book, you will have gained a firm understanding of what reinforcement learning is and understand how to put your knowledge to practical use by leveraging the power of TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Markov Decision Process

The Markov decision process, better known as MDP, is an approach in reinforcement learning to take decisions in a gridworld environment. A gridworld environment consists of states in the form of grids, such as the one in the FrozenLake-v0 environment from OpenAI gym, which we tried to examine and solve in the last chapter.

The MDP tries to capture a world in the form of a grid by dividing it into states, actions, models/transition models, and rewards. The solution to an MDP is called a policy and the objective is to find the optimal policy for that MDP task.

Thus, any reinforcement learning task composed of a set of states, actions, and rewards that follows the Markov property would be considered an MDP.

In this chapter, we will dig deep into MDPs, states, actions, rewards, policies, and how to solve them using Bellman equations. Moreover, we will cover the basics of Partially Observable MDP and their complexity in solving. We will also cover the exploration...