Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

By : Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani
Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

By: Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani

Overview of this book

Reinforcement learning is one of the most exciting and rapidly growing fields in machine learning. This is due to the many novel algorithms developed and incredible results published in recent years. In this book, you will learn about the core concepts of RL including Q-learning, policy gradients, Monte Carlo processes, and several deep reinforcement learning algorithms. As you make your way through the book, you'll work on projects with datasets of various modalities including image, text, and video. You will gain experience in several domains, including gaming, image processing, and physical simulations. You'll explore technologies such as TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to implement deep learning reinforcement learning algorithms that also predict stock prices, generate natural language, and even build other neural networks. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience with eight reinforcement learning projects, each addressing different topics and/or algorithms. We hope these practical exercises will provide you with better intuition and insight about the field of reinforcement learning and how to apply its algorithms to various problems in real life.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

The shortcomings of reinforcement learning


So far, we have only covered what reinforcement learning algorithms can do. To the reader, reinforcement learning may seem like the panacea for all kinds of problems. But why do we not see a ubiquitous application of reinforcement learning algorithms in real-life situations? The reality is that the field has a myriad of shortcomings that hinder commercial adoption.

Why is it necessary to talk about the field's flaws? We think this will help you build a more holistic, less biased view of reinforcement learning. Moreover, understanding the weaknesses of reinforcement learning and machine learning is an important quality of a good machine learning researcher or practitioner. In the following subsections, we will discuss a few of the most important limitations that reinforcement learning is currently facing.

 

Resource efficiency

Current deep reinforcement learning algorithms require vast amounts of time, training data, and computational resources in order...