Book Image

The Reinforcement Learning Workshop

By : Alessandro Palmas, Emanuele Ghelfi, Dr. Alexandra Galina Petre, Mayur Kulkarni, Anand N.S., Quan Nguyen, Aritra Sen, Anthony So, Saikat Basak
Book Image

The Reinforcement Learning Workshop

By: Alessandro Palmas, Emanuele Ghelfi, Dr. Alexandra Galina Petre, Mayur Kulkarni, Anand N.S., Quan Nguyen, Aritra Sen, Anthony So, Saikat Basak

Overview of this book

Various intelligent applications such as video games, inventory management software, warehouse robots, and translation tools use reinforcement learning (RL) to make decisions and perform actions that maximize the probability of the desired outcome. This book will help you to get to grips with the techniques and the algorithms for implementing RL in your machine learning models. Starting with an introduction to RL, youÔÇÖll be guided through different RL environments and frameworks. YouÔÇÖll learn how to implement your own custom environments and use OpenAI baselines to run RL algorithms. Once youÔÇÖve explored classic RL techniques such as Dynamic Programming, Monte Carlo, and TD Learning, youÔÇÖll understand when to apply the different deep learning methods in RL and advance to deep Q-learning. The book will even help you understand the different stages of machine-based problem-solving by using DARQN on a popular video game Breakout. Finally, youÔÇÖll find out when to use a policy-based method to tackle an RL problem. By the end of The Reinforcement Learning Workshop, youÔÇÖll be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to solve challenging problems using reinforcement learning.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Preface
Free Chapter
2
2. Markov Decision Processes and Bellman Equations

Solving Dynamic Programming Problems

There are two popular ways to solve DP problems: the tabular method and memoization. In the tabular method, we build a matrix that stores the intermediate values one by one in the lookup table. On the other hand, in the memoization method, we store the same values in an unstructured way. Here, unstructured way refers to the fact that the lookup table may be filled all at once.

Imagine you're a baker and are selling cakes to shops. Your job is to sell cakes and make the maximum profit out of it. For simplicity, we will assume that all other costs are fixed, and the highest price offered for your product is the only indicator of profits earned, which is a fair assumption for most business cases. So, naturally, you'd wish to sell all your cakes to the shop offering the highest price, but there's a decision to make as there are multiple shops that offer different prices on different sizes of cakes. So, you have two choices: how much...