Reinforcement Learning?

Data Science, AI and ML
#1

In machine learning, a common drawback is the vast amount of data that models need to train. The more complex a model, the more data it may require. Even after all this, the data we get may not be reliable. It may have false or missing values or may be collected from untrustworthy sources.

Reinforcement Learning overcomes the problem of data acquisition by almost completely removing the need for data!

Reinforcement learning is a branch of Machine Learning that trains a model to come to an optimum solution for a problem by taking decisions by itself.

It consists of:

  • An Environment, which an agent will interact with, to learn to reach a goal or perform an action.
  • A Reward if the action performed by the model is bringing us closer to the goal/is leading to the goal. This is done to train the model in the right direction.
  • A negative reward if it performs an action that will not lead to the goal to prevent it from learning in the wrong direction.

Reinforcement learning requires a machine learning model to learn from the problem and come up with the most optimal solution by itself. This means that we also arrive at fast and unique solutions which the programmer might not even have thought of.

Consider the image below. You can see a dog in a room that has to perform an action, which is fetching. The dog is the agent; the room is the environment it has to work in, and the action to be performed is fetching.