Book Image

Scala for Machine Learning, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Scala for Machine Learning, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The discovery of information through data clustering and classification is becoming a key differentiator for competitive organizations. Machine learning applications are everywhere, from self-driving cars, engineering design, logistics, manufacturing, and trading strategies, to detection of genetic anomalies. The book is your one stop guide that introduces you to the functional capabilities of the Scala programming language that are critical to the creation of machine learning algorithms such as dependency injection and implicits. You start by learning data preprocessing and filtering techniques. Following this, you'll move on to unsupervised learning techniques such as clustering and dimension reduction, followed by probabilistic graphical models such as Naïve Bayes, hidden Markov models and Monte Carlo inference. Further, it covers the discriminative algorithms such as linear, logistic regression with regularization, kernelization, support vector machines, neural networks, and deep learning. You’ll move on to evolutionary computing, multibandit algorithms, and reinforcement learning. Finally, the book includes a comprehensive overview of parallel computing in Scala and Akka followed by a description of Apache Spark and its ML library. With updated codes based on the latest version of Scala and comprehensive examples, this book will ensure that you have more than just a solid fundamental knowledge in machine learning with Scala.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Scala for Machine Learning Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Chapter 15. Reinforcement Learning

You may wonder, at this stage of the book, how robotics, gaming, and autonomous systems leverage machine learning. The answer lies in a field of AI known as reinforcement learning. For those with no familiarity with reinforcement learning, I highly recommend you read the seminal book on reinforcement learning by R. Sutton and A. Barto [11:1] if you are interested to know about its origin, purpose, and scientific foundation.

The first part of this chapter focuses on the Q-learning algorithm. The second part is dedicated to Learning Classifier Systems (LCS), which combine reinforcement learning techniques with evolutionary computing, introduced in the previous chapter. Learning classifiers are an interesting breed of algorithm that is not commonly included in literature dedicated to machine learning.

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

  • Basic concepts behind reinforcement learning

  • Detailed implementation of the Q-learning algorithm

  • A simple approach...