Reinforcement Learning - Principles, Concepts and Applications

Book excerpt: Reinforcement learning (RL) is a subfield of machine learning that deals with how an agent should learn to take actions in an environment to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. In other words, reinforcement learning is a learning paradigm where an agent learns to interact with an environment by taking actions and observing the feedback it receives in the form of rewards or penalties. It is a feedback-based Machine learning technique in which an agent learns to behave in an environment by performing the actions and seeing the results of actions. For each good action, the agent gets positive feedback, and for each bad action, the agent gets negative feedback or penalty.