My elaborate study notes on reinforcement learning

I will not tell you why, but all of a sudden I was in need of writing an article series on Reinforcement Learning. Though I am also a beginner in reinforcement learning field. Everything I knew was what I learned from one online lecture conducted in a lazy tone in my college. However in the process of learning reinforcement learning, I found a line which could connect the two dots, one is reinforcement learning and the other is my studying field. That is why I made up my mind to make an article series on reinforcement learning seriously.

To be a bit more concrete, I imagine that technologies in our world could be enhanced by a combination of reinforcement learning and virtual reality. That means companies like Toyota or VW might come to invest on visual effect or video game companies more seriously in the future. And I have been actually struggling with how to train deep learning with cgi, which might bridge the virtual world and the real world.

As I am also a beginner in reinforcement learning, this article series would a kind of study note for me. But as I have been doing in my former articles, I prefer exhaustive but intuitive explanations on AI algorithms, thus I will do my best to make my series as instructive and effective as existing tutorial on reinforcement learning.

This article is going to be composed of the following contents.

• Understanding the “simplicity” of reinforcement learning: comprehensive tips to take the trouble out of RL
• Graphical understanding of dynamic programming and the Bellman equation: taking a typical approach at first
• Four essential ideas for making reinforcement learning and dynamic programming more effective
• How computers “experience” things: model-free reinforcement learning and temporal difference 
• A thaw in another winter of artificial intelligence: uses of deep learning in reinforcement learning (coming soon!)

In this article I would like to share what I have learned about RL, and I hope you could get some hints of learning this fascinating field. In case you have any comments or advice on my “study note,” leaving a comment or contacting me via email would be appreciated.

About Author

Yasuto Tamura

Data Science Intern at DATANOMIQ.
Majoring in computer science. Currently studying mathematical sides of deep learning, such as densely connected layers, CNN, RNN, autoencoders, and making study materials on them. Also started aiming at Bayesian deep learning algorithms.

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