An Introduction to Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

This chapter provides a concise introduction to Reinforcement Learning (RL) from a machine learning perspective. It provides the required background to understand the chapters related to RL in this book. It makes no assumption on previous knowledge in this research area and includes short descriptions of some of the latest trends, which are normally excluded from other introductions or overviews on RL. The chapter provides more emphasis on the general conceptual framework and ideas of RL rather than on presenting a rigorous mathematical discussion that may require a great deal of effort by the reader. The first section provides a general introduction to the area. The following section describes the most common solution techniques. In the third section, some of the most recent techniques proposed to deal with large search spaces are described. Finally, the last section provides some final remarks and current research challenges in RL.