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

Identifying Dynamic Programming Problems

While it is easy to solve a DP problem once you identify how it recurses, it is difficult to determine whether a problem can be solved using DP. For instance, the traveling salesman problem, where you are given a graph and wish to cover all the vertices in the least possible time, is something that can't be solved using DP. Every DP problem must satisfy two prerequisites: it should have an optimal substructure and should have overlapping subproblems. We'll look into exactly what they mean and how to solve them in the subsequent section.

Optimal Substructures

Recall the best path example we discussed earlier. If you want to go from point A to point C through B, and you know that's the best path, there's no point in exploring others. Rephrasing this: If I want to go from A to D and I know the best path from A to C, then the best route from A to D will include the path from A to C. This is called the optimal substructure...