Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives when interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning. Their discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications. The only necessary mathematical background is familiarity with elementary concepts of probability. The book is divided into three parts. Part I defines the reinforcement learning problem in terms of Markov decision processes. Part II provides basic solution methods: dynamic programming, Monte Carlo methods, and temporal-difference learning. Part III presents a unified view of the solution methods and incorporates artificial neural networks, eligibility traces, and planning; the two final chapters present case studies and consider the future of reinforcement learning.

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Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of current work are summarized. Reinforcement learning is the problem faced by an agent that learns behavior through trial-and-error interactions with a dynamic environment. The work described here has a resemblance to work in psychology, but differs considerably in the details and in the use of the word ``reinforcement.'' The paper discusses central issues of reinforcement learning, including trading off exploration and exploitation, establishing the foundations of the field via Markov decision theory, learning from delayed reinforcement, constructing empirical models to accelerate learning, making use of generalization and hierarchy, and coping with hidden state. It concludes with a survey of some implemented systems and an assessment of the practical utility of current methods for reinforcement learning.

Reinforcement Learning: A Survey

Probabilistic graphical models and decision graphs are powerful modeling tools for reasoning and decision making under uncertainty. As modeling languages they allow a natural specification of problem domains with inherent uncertainty, and from a computational perspective they support efficient algorithms for automatic construction and query answering. This includes belief updating, finding the most probable explanation for the observed evidence, detecting conflicts in the evidence entered into the network, determining optimal strategies, analyzing for relevance, and performing sensitivity analysis. The book introduces probabilistic graphical models and decision graphs, including Bayesian networks and influence diagrams. The reader is introduced to the two types of frameworks through examples and exercises, which also instruct the reader on how to build these models. The book is a new edition of Bayesian Networks and Decision Graphs by Finn V. Jensen. The new edition is structured into two parts. The first part focuses on probabilistic graphical models. Compared with the previous book, the new edition also includes a thorough description of recent extensions to the Bayesian network modeling language, advances in exact and approximate belief updating algorithms, and methods for learning both the structure and the parameters of a Bayesian network. The second part deals with decision graphs, and in addition to the frameworks described in the previous edition, it also introduces Markov decision processes and partially ordered decision problems. The authors also provide a well-founded practical introduction to Bayesian networks, object-oriented Bayesian networks, decision trees, influence diagrams (and variants hereof), and Markov decision processes. give practical advice on the construction of Bayesian networks, decision trees, and influence diagrams from domain knowledge. give several examples and exercises exploiting computer systems for dealing with Bayesian networks and decision graphs. present a thorough introduction to state-of-the-art solution and analysis algorithms. The book is intended as a textbook, but it can also be used for self-study and as a reference book.

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Bayesian networks and decision graphs

http://people.csail.mit.edu/lpk/papers/aij98-pomdp.pdf

Planning and Acting in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains

As one of the most successful approaches to building recommender systems, collaborative filtering (CF) uses the known preferences of a group of users to make recommendations or predictions of the unknown preferences for other users. In this paper, we first introduce CF tasks and their main challenges, such as data sparsity, scalability, synonymy, gray sheep, shilling attacks, privacy protection, etc., and their possible solutions. We then present three main categories of CF techniques: memory-based, modelbased, and hybrid CF algorithms (that combine CF with other recommendation techniques), with examples for representative algorithms of each category, and analysis of their predictive performance and their ability to address the challenges. From basic techniques to the state-of-the-art, we attempt to present a comprehensive survey for CF techniques, which can be served as a roadmap for research and practice in this area.

/pdf/a-survey-of-collaborative-filtering-techniques-19zxbumsgq.pdf

H. Kaufman

Papers

Dynamic Programming and Markov Processes.