Book Image

Hands-On Q-Learning with Python

By : Nazia Habib
Book Image

Hands-On Q-Learning with Python

By: Nazia Habib

Overview of this book

Q-learning is a machine learning algorithm used to solve optimization problems in artificial intelligence (AI). It is one of the most popular fields of study among AI researchers. This book starts off by introducing you to reinforcement learning and Q-learning, in addition to helping you become familiar with OpenAI Gym as well as libraries such as Keras and TensorFlow. A few chapters into the book, you will gain insights into model-free Q-learning and use deep Q-networks and double deep Q-networks to solve complex problems. This book will guide you in exploring use cases such as self-driving vehicles and OpenAI Gym’s CartPole problem. You will also learn how to tune and optimize Q-networks and their hyperparameters. As you progress, you will understand the reinforcement learning approach to solving real-world problems. You will also explore how to use Q-learning and related algorithms in scientific research. Toward the end, you’ll gain insight into what’s in store for reinforcement learning. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to solve reinforcement learning problems using Q-learning algorithms with OpenAI Gym, Keras, and TensorFlow.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Q-Learning: A Roadmap
6
Section 2: Building and Optimizing Q-Learning Agents
9
Section 3: Advanced Q-Learning Challenges with Keras, TensorFlow, and OpenAI Gym

Getting started with OpenAI Gym

In this section, we'll get familiar with the OpenAI Gym package and learn how to get it up and running in your Python development environment.

What is Gym?

OpenAI Gym is a toolkit of environments for building RL algorithms. In the context of RL, an environment refers to the actual task (a Markov decision process or MDP) that is to be solved by the algorithm. The state and action spaces of the task are defined by the environment.

Be careful not to get the RL use of the word environment confused with others that we might use in different contexts, such as a Python development environment or a Unix/Linux environment. Those terms refer to very different things.

The following diagram shows...