Book Image

Python Machine Learning By Example - Third Edition

By : Yuxi (Hayden) Liu
Book Image

Python Machine Learning By Example - Third Edition

By: Yuxi (Hayden) Liu

Overview of this book

Python Machine Learning By Example, Third Edition serves as a comprehensive gateway into the world of machine learning (ML). With six new chapters, on topics including movie recommendation engine development with Naïve Bayes, recognizing faces with support vector machine, predicting stock prices with artificial neural networks, categorizing images of clothing with convolutional neural networks, predicting with sequences using recurring neural networks, and leveraging reinforcement learning for making decisions, the book has been considerably updated for the latest enterprise requirements. At the same time, this book provides actionable insights on the key fundamentals of ML with Python programming. Hayden applies his expertise to demonstrate implementations of algorithms in Python, both from scratch and with libraries. Each chapter walks through an industry-adopted application. With the help of realistic examples, you will gain an understanding of the mechanics of ML techniques in areas such as exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, classification, regression, clustering, and NLP. By the end of this ML Python book, you will have gained a broad picture of the ML ecosystem and will be well-versed in the best practices of applying ML techniques to solve problems.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Performing Monte Carlo learning

Monte Carlo (MC)-based reinforcement learning is a model-free approach, which means it doesn't need a known transition matrix and reward matrix. In this section, you will learn about MC policy evaluation on the Blackjack environment, and solve the environment with MC Control algorithms. Blackjack is a typical environment with an unknown transition matrix. Let's first simulate the Blackjack environment.

Simulating the Blackjack environment

Blackjack is a popular card game. The game has the following rules:

  • The player competes against a dealer and wins if the total value of their cards is higher and doesn't exceed 21.
  • Cards from 2 to 10 have values from 2 to 10.
  • Cards J, K, and Q have a value of 10.
  • The value of an ace can be either 1 or 11 (called a "usable" ace).
  • At the beginning, both parties are given two random cards, but only one of the dealer's cards is revealed to the player...