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

The Python Interface

The Python environment that will help facilitate our discussions of MAB algorithms is included in the utils.py file of this chapter's code repository on GitHub: https://packt.live/3cWiZ8j.

From this file, we can import the Bandit class into a separate script or a Jupyter script. This class is the interface we will use to create, interact, and solve various MAB problems. If the code we are working with is in the same directory as this file, we can import the Bandit class by simply using the following code:

from utils import Bandit

Then, we can declare an MAB problem as an instance of a Bandit object:

my_bandit = Bandit()

Since we are not passing any arguments to this declaration, this Bandit instance takes on its default value: an MAB problem with two Bernoulli arms with probabilities of 0.7 and 0.3 (although our algorithms technically cannot know this).

The most integral method of the Bandit class that we need to be aware of is pull(). This...