Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Python - Second Edition

By : Sudharsan Ravichandiran
Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Python - Second Edition

By: Sudharsan Ravichandiran

Overview of this book

With significant enhancements in the quality and quantity of algorithms in recent years, this second edition of Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python has been revamped into an example-rich guide to learning state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) and deep RL algorithms with TensorFlow 2 and the OpenAI Gym toolkit. In addition to exploring RL basics and foundational concepts such as Bellman equation, Markov decision processes, and dynamic programming algorithms, this second edition dives deep into the full spectrum of value-based, policy-based, and actor-critic RL methods. It explores state-of-the-art algorithms such as DQN, TRPO, PPO and ACKTR, DDPG, TD3, and SAC in depth, demystifying the underlying math and demonstrating implementations through simple code examples. The book has several new chapters dedicated to new RL techniques, including distributional RL, imitation learning, inverse RL, and meta RL. You will learn to leverage stable baselines, an improvement of OpenAI’s baseline library, to effortlessly implement popular RL algorithms. The book concludes with an overview of promising approaches such as meta-learning and imagination augmented agents in research. By the end, you will become skilled in effectively employing RL and deep RL in your real-world projects.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
18
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19
Index

Applications of MAB

So far, we have learned about the MAB problem and how can we solve it using various exploration strategies. But our goal is not to just use these algorithms for playing slot machines. We can apply the various exploration strategies to several different use cases.

For instance, bandits can be used as an alternative to AB testing. AB testing is one of the most commonly used classic methods of testing. Say we have two versions of the landing page of our website. Suppose we want to know which version of the landing page is most liked by the users. In this case, we conduct AB testing to understand which version of the landing page is most liked by the users. So, we show version 1 of the landing page to a particular set of users and version 2 of the landing page to other set of users. Then we measure several metrics, such as click-through rate, average time spent on the website, and so on, to understand which version of the landing page is most liked by the users...