https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/DeepLearningInNeuralNetworksOverview.JSchmidhuber2015.pdf

Deep learning in neural networks

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

http://www-anw.cs.umass.edu/~barto/courses/cs687/Sutton-Precup-Singh-AIJ99.pdf

Between MDPs and semi-MDPs: a framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning encompasses both a science of adaptive behavior of rational beings in uncertain environments and a computational methodology for finding optimal behaviors for challenging problems in control, optimization and adaptive behavior of intelligent agents. As a field, reinforcement learning has progressed tremendously in the past decade.The main goal of this book is to present an up-to-date series of survey articles on the main contemporary sub-fields of reinforcement learning. This includes surveys on partially observable environments, hierarchical task decompositions, relational knowledge representation and predictive state representations. Furthermore, topics such as transfer, evolutionary methods and continuous spaces in reinforcement learning are surveyed. In addition, several chapters review reinforcement learning methods in robotics, in games, and in computational neuroscience. In total seventeen different subfields are presented by mostly young experts in those areas, and together they truly represent a state-of-the-art of current reinforcement learning research.Marco Wiering works at the artificial intelligence department of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has published extensively on various reinforcement learning topics. Martijn van Otterlo works in the cognitive artificial intelligence group at the Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands. He has mainly focused on expressive knowledgerepresentation in reinforcement learning settings.

Reinforcement Learning: State-of-the-Art

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Leraning for Traffic Light Control

2011 international joint conference on neural networks (ijcnn)

Situated in between supervised learning and unsupervised learning, the paradigm of reinforcement learning deals with learning in sequential decision making problems in which there is limited feedback. This text introduces the intuitions and concepts behind Markov decision processes and two classes of algorithms for computing optimal behaviors: reinforcement learning and dynamic programming. First the formal framework of Markov decision process is defined, accompanied by the definition of value functions and policies. The main part of this text deals with introducing foundational classes of algorithms for learning optimal behaviors, based on various definitions of optimality with respect to the goal of learning sequential decisions. Additionally, it surveys efficient extensions of the foundational algorithms, differing mainly in the way feedback given by the environment is used to speed up learning, and in the way they concentrate on relevant parts of the problem. For both model-based and model-free settings these efficient extensions have shown useful in scaling up to larger problems.

/pdf/reinforcement-learning-and-markov-decision-processes-mx0ggrs1tn.pdf

Reinforcement Learning and Markov Decision Processes

Quite some research has been done on reinforcement learning in continuous environments, but the research on problems where the actions can also be chosen from a continuous space is much more limited. We present a new class of algorithms named continuous actor critic learning automaton (CACLA) that can handle continuous states and actions. The resulting algorithm is straightforward to implement. An experimental comparison is made between this algorithm and other algorithms that can handle continuous action spaces. These experiments show that CACLA performs much better than the other algorithms, especially when it is combined with a Gaussian exploration method

/pdf/reinforcement-learning-in-continuous-action-spaces-26rpi14v22.pdf

Marco A. Wiering

Papers

Reinforcement Learning: State-of-the-Art

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Leraning for Traffic Light Control

2011 international joint conference on neural networks (ijcnn)

Reinforcement Learning and Markov Decision Processes

Reinforcement Learning in Continuous Action Spaces