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You're reading from  Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inJan 2020
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781838826994
Edition2nd Edition
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Author (1)
Maxim Lapan
Maxim Lapan
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Maxim Lapan

Maxim has been working as a software developer for more than 20 years and was involved in various areas: distributed scientific computing, distributed systems and big data processing. Since 2014 he is actively using machine and deep learning to solve practical industrial tasks, such as NLP problems, RL for web crawling and web pages analysis. He has been living in Germany with his family.
Read more about Maxim Lapan

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The theoretical foundations of RL

In this section, I will introduce you to the mathematical representation and notation of the formalisms (reward, agent, actions, observations, and environment) that we just discussed. Then, using this as a knowledge base, we will explore the second-order notions of the RL language, including state, episode, history, value, and gain, which will be used repeatedly to describe different methods later in the book.

Markov decision processes

Before that, we will cover Markov decision processes (MDPs), which will be described like a Russian matryoshka doll: we will start from the simplest case of a Markov process (MP), then extend that with rewards, which will turn it into a Markov reward process. Then, we will put this idea into an extra envelope by adding actions, which will lead us to an MDP.

MPs and MDPs are widely used in computer science and other engineering fields. So, reading this chapter will be useful for you not only for RL contexts,...

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Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. - Second Edition
Published in: Jan 2020Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781838826994

Author (1)

author image
Maxim Lapan

Maxim has been working as a software developer for more than 20 years and was involved in various areas: distributed scientific computing, distributed systems and big data processing. Since 2014 he is actively using machine and deep learning to solve practical industrial tasks, such as NLP problems, RL for web crawling and web pages analysis. He has been living in Germany with his family.
Read more about Maxim Lapan