Search icon
Subscription
0
Cart icon
Close icon
You have no products in your basket yet
Save more on your purchases!
Savings automatically calculated. No voucher code required
Arrow left icon
All Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Newsletters
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python

You're reading from  Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python

Product type Book
Published in Dec 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781838644147
Pages 544 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
Author (1):
Enes Bilgin Enes Bilgin
Profile icon Enes Bilgin

Table of Contents (24) Chapters

Preface 1. Section 1: Reinforcement Learning Foundations
2. Chapter 1: Introduction to Reinforcement Learning 3. Chapter 2: Multi-Armed Bandits 4. Chapter 3: Contextual Bandits 5. Chapter 4: Makings of a Markov Decision Process 6. Chapter 5: Solving the Reinforcement Learning Problem 7. Section 2: Deep Reinforcement Learning
8. Chapter 6: Deep Q-Learning at Scale 9. Chapter 7: Policy-Based Methods 10. Chapter 8: Model-Based Methods 11. Chapter 9: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning 12. Section 3: Advanced Topics in RL
13. Chapter 10: Introducing Machine Teaching 14. Chapter 11: Achieving Generalization and Overcoming Partial Observability 15. Chapter 12: Meta-Reinforcement Learning 16. Chapter 13: Exploring Advanced Topics 17. Section 4: Applications of RL
18. Chapter 14: Solving Robot Learning 19. Chapter 15: Supply Chain Management 20. Chapter 16: Personalization, Marketing, and Finance 21. Chapter 17: Smart City and Cybersecurity 22. Chapter 18: Challenges and Future Directions in Reinforcement Learning 23. Other Books You May Enjoy

Training your agent with Monte Carlo methods

Let's say you would like to learn the chance of flipping heads with a particular, possibly biased, coin:

  • One way of calculating this is through a careful analysis of the physical properties of the coin. Although this could give you the precise probability distribution of the outcomes, it is far from being a practical approach.
  • Alternatively, you can just flip the coin many times and look at the distribution in your sample. Your estimate could be a bit off if you don't have a large sample, but it will do the job for most practical purposes. The math you need to deal with using the latter method will be incomparably simpler.

Just like in the coin example, we can estimate the state values and action values in an MDP from random samples. Monte Carlo (MC) estimation is a general concept that refers to making estimations through repeated random sampling. In the context of RL, it refers to a collection of methods...

lock icon The rest of the chapter is locked
Register for a free Packt account to unlock a world of extra content!
A free Packt account unlocks extra newsletters, articles, discounted offers, and much more. Start advancing your knowledge today.
Unlock this book and the full library FREE for 7 days
Get unlimited access to 7000+ expert-authored eBooks and videos courses covering every tech area you can think of
Renews at $15.99/month. Cancel anytime}