Preface

This book is on reinforcement learning (RL), which is a subfield of machine learning (ML); it focuses on the general and challenging problem of learning optimal behavior in complex environments. The learning process is driven only by the reward value and observations obtained from the environment. This model is very general and can be applied to many practical situations, from playing games to optimizing complex manufacturing processes. We largely focus on deep RL in this book, which is RL that leverages deep learning (DL) methods.

Due to its flexibility and generality, the field of RL is developing very quickly and attracting lots of attention, both from researchers who are trying to improve existing methods or create new methods and from practitioners interested in solving their problems in the most efficient way.