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You're reading from  Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python

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Published inDec 2020
Reading LevelBeginner
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781838644147
Edition1st Edition
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Enes Bilgin
Enes Bilgin
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Enes Bilgin

Enes Bilgin works as a senior AI engineer and a tech lead in Microsoft's Autonomous Systems division. He is a machine learning and operations research practitioner and researcher with experience in building production systems and models for top tech companies using Python, TensorFlow, and Ray/RLlib. He holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in systems engineering from Boston University and a B.S. in industrial engineering from Bilkent University. In the past, he has worked as a research scientist at Amazon and as an operations research scientist at AMD. He also held adjunct faculty positions at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and at the Ingram School of Engineering at Texas State University.
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Understanding the importance of the simulation in reinforcement learning

As we mentioned multiple times so far, and especially in the first chapter when we talked about RL success stories, RL's hunger for data is orders of magnitude greater than that of deep supervised learning. That is why it takes many months to train some complex RL agents, over millions and billions of iterations. Since it is often impractical to collect such data in a physical environment, we heavily rely on simulation models in training RL agents. This brings some challenges along with it:

  • Many businesses don't have a simulation model of their processes. This makes it challenging to bring the RL technology to the use of such companies.
  • When a simulation model exists, it is often too simplistic to capture the real-world dynamics. As a result, RL models could easily overfit to the simulation environment and may fail in deployment. It takes significant time and resources to calibrate and validate...
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Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python
Published in: Dec 2020Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781838644147

Author (1)

author image
Enes Bilgin

Enes Bilgin works as a senior AI engineer and a tech lead in Microsoft's Autonomous Systems division. He is a machine learning and operations research practitioner and researcher with experience in building production systems and models for top tech companies using Python, TensorFlow, and Ray/RLlib. He holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in systems engineering from Boston University and a B.S. in industrial engineering from Bilkent University. In the past, he has worked as a research scientist at Amazon and as an operations research scientist at AMD. He also held adjunct faculty positions at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and at the Ingram School of Engineering at Texas State University.
Read more about Enes Bilgin