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Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning 

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Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
 at 
Coursera 
Overview

Duration

15 hours

Total fee

Free

Mode of learning

Online

Difficulty level

Intermediate

Official Website

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Credential

Certificate

Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
Table of content
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  • Overview
  • Highlights
  • Course Details
  • Curriculum
  • Student Reviews

Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
 at 
Coursera 
Highlights

  • Shareable Certificate Earn a Certificate upon completion
  • 100% online Start instantly and learn at your own schedule.
  • Course 1 of 4 in the Reinforcement Learning Specialization
  • Flexible deadlines Reset deadlines in accordance to your schedule.
  • Intermediate Level Probabilities & Expectations, basic linear algebra, basic calculus, Python 3.0 (at least 1 year), implementing algorithms from pseudocode.
  • Approx. 15 hours to complete
  • English Subtitles: Arabic, French, Portuguese (European), Italian, Vietnamese, German, Russian, English, Spanish
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Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
 at 
Coursera 
Course details

More about this course
  • Reinforcement Learning is a subfield of Machine Learning, but is also a general purpose formalism for automated decision-making and AI. This course introduces you to statistical learning techniques where an agent explicitly takes actions and interacts with the world. Understanding the importance and challenges of learning agents that make decisions is of vital importance today, with more and more companies interested in interactive agents and intelligent decision-making.
  • This course introduces you to the fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning. When you finish this course, you will:
  • - Formalize problems as Markov Decision Processes
  • - Understand basic exploration methods and the exploration/exploitation tradeoff
  • - Understand value functions, as a general-purpose tool for optimal decision-making
  • - Know how to implement dynamic programming as an efficient solution approach to an industrial control problem
  • This course teaches you the key concepts of Reinforcement Learning, underlying classic and modern algorithms in RL. After completing this course, you will be able to start using RL for real problems, where you have or can specify the MDP.
  • This is the first course of the Reinforcement Learning Specialization.
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Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
 at 
Coursera 
Curriculum

Welcome to the Course!

Specialization Introduction

Course Introduction

Meet your instructors!

Your Specialization Roadmap

Reinforcement Learning Textbook

Read Me: Pre-requisites and Learning Objectives

Sequential Decision Making with Evaluative Feedback

Learning Action Values

Estimating Action Values Incrementally

What is the trade-off?

Optimistic Initial Values

Upper-Confidence Bound (UCB) Action Selection

Jonathan Langford: Contextual Bandits for Real World Reinforcement Learning

Week 1 Summary

Module 1 Learning Objectives

Weekly Reading

Chapter Summary

Sequential Decision-Making

Markov Decision Processes

Markov Decision Processes

Examples of MDPs

The Goal of Reinforcement Learning

Michael Littman: The Reward Hypothesis

Continuing Tasks

Examples of Episodic and Continuing Tasks

Week 2 Summary

Module 2 Learning Objectives

Weekly Reading

MDPs

Value Functions & Bellman Equations

Specifying Policies

Value Functions

Rich Sutton and Andy Barto: A brief History of RL

Bellman Equation Derivation

Why Bellman Equations?

Optimal Policies

Optimal Value Functions

Using Optimal Value Functions to Get Optimal Policies

Week 3 Summary

Module 3 Learning Objectives

Weekly Reading

Chapter Summary

[Practice] Value Functions and Bellman Equations

Value Functions and Bellman Equations

Dynamic Programming

Policy Evaluation vs. Control

Iterative Policy Evaluation

Policy Improvement

Policy Iteration

Flexibility of the Policy Iteration Framework

Efficiency of Dynamic Programming

Warren Powell: Approximate Dynamic Programming for Fleet Management (Short)

Warren Powell: Approximate Dynamic Programming for Fleet Management (Long)

Week 4 Summary

Congratulations!

Module 4 Learning Objectives

Weekly Reading

Chapter Summary

Dynamic Programming

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Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
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Students Ratings & Reviews

5/5
Verified Icon1 Rating
J
Joel Joseph
Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
Offered by Coursera
5
Learning Experience: Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning, straight from Sutton and Bart's textbook
Faculty: Don't remember. But University of Alberta Profs. Intuitive explanation with textbook reading side by side
Course Support: No career support provided
Reviewed on 5 Mar 2022Read More
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Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
 at 
Coursera 

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