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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning by University of Alberta

4.8
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2,702 ratings

About the 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....

Top reviews

AT

Jul 6, 2020

An excellent introduction to Reinforcement Learning, accompanied by a well-organized & informative handbook. I definitely recommend this course to have a strong foundation in Reinforcement Learning.

HT

Apr 7, 2020

This course is one of the best I've learned so far in coursera. The explanations are clear and concise enough. It took a while for me to understand Bellman equation but when I did, it felt amazing!

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101 - 125 of 651 Reviews for Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning

By DANTE K

Dec 28, 2020

Teachers were very clear and so was the book. The only thing I feel could be improved is adding some coding exercises on Week 2 and 3 (there's only one at Week 1 and one at Week 4, with a Peer Reviewed assignment on Week 2 which was fun, but didn't feel as useful as coding exercises)

By Sandesh J

Jun 1, 2020

One of the best available courses on Reinforcement Learning. The instructors have explained all the underlying topics elegantly. Good blend of theory and numerical in assignments and programming problems. Moreover, the assignments have covered different perspectives on these topics.

By Sara S

Dec 28, 2020

Excellent Course. Although it was only 4 weeks course, I learned more than reading an entirely dynamic programming book which might take more than 3 months for me. It was a well-presented course and I suggest this course to the ones that want to learn about Dynamic programming

By Giulio C

Jun 25, 2020

Amazing course!

The book, on which this course is based, is a bible for reinforcement learning. Anyway, it could be hard to understand. The lectures of the course eliminate all doubts and consolidate all the concepts, ensuring a complete comprehension on the subject.

Thank you!

By Bae,Bongsung

Apr 20, 2020

Great starting point for learning Reinforcement Learning. Anyone who is interested in the state-of-the-art RL techniques should take this course first, or they will have hard time getting through the more applied and sophisticated concepts found in the tech blogs or papers.

By Majd W

Oct 24, 2019

The thing that makes this course outstand among other Coursera courses is that it is based on a book. That gives you more information if you need it.

One problem that I guess will be solved in the future is that there is a bug in the Programming Assignment submission code.

By Juan C E

Feb 9, 2020

Excellent course. Excellent teachers. I love the introduction sections, in which you're presented what you'll learn in each video, and the summary section. The animated slides are also very professional. Very thorough coverage of the RL book. Congratulations!!!

By Rohit P

Jul 25, 2020

Some supplementary video recommendations and a little more interactive help with the Python assignments would make it more fun. Had to struggle with the programming assignments a little bit. More hands on assignments will help drive home the concepts better.

By Tolga K

Oct 15, 2020

Great course, great notebooks and great instructors, but nevertheless the reading parts of the course is most important part I think. Because if you do your reading well and really understand the material then course is just repeating over what you learn.

By Yover M C C

Mar 1, 2020

Excelente curso, aprendí los conceptos de aprendizaje por refuerzo con gran base teórica, el material del curso es muy bueno y la calidad de las lecturas es de excelente nivel. Muy recomendado, ahora a aprender más y a desarrollar sistemas inteligentes :).

By Le Q A

Aug 2, 2020

Excellent introduction. The reading materials are good, the videos make the ideas even clearer and the exercises help us get a taste of how the theory could be applied. I would recommend this course to anyone wanting to start on Reinforcement Learning.

By Evgeny S

Apr 18, 2020

I enjoyed the course. I would have preferred a bit more in-depth look at the algorithms and technical details, but, on the other hand, it was also interesting to go and figure out these contraction mapping arguments on your own. Overall, very good.

By Ayan S

Mar 18, 2021

The course videos are exceptionally brilliant. It was my first course on reinforcement learning and the instructors did a great job in making this topic look super easy and intuitive. Looking forward to the next courses of the same specialization.

By Leelamohan

Feb 16, 2020

I had learned a clear understanding of terminology and the formulas of value function, action-value function, optimal value function, Bellman's equation, policy evaluation and iteration. It's a must go through course for Reinforcement Learning

By Dan N

Oct 22, 2021

Very good integration with the RL Book and step by step video presentations. Coding assignments well structured, however I would have liked to have more such assignments. All in all, very well though and structured course in RL fundamentals.

By Manuel

Jul 22, 2020

The most professionally presented course I have done on Coursera! Instructors explain well, the provided literature is on point and the assignments had a good mix of being doable and challenging. Probably the best course I have taken so far.

By Stefan K

Dec 4, 2020

The course covers the fundamentals of reinforcement-learning and also deals with complex mathematic equations. However the math is very good explained in the videos and the 2 programming exercises help a lot for understanding this topic.

By Steven W

May 11, 2021

Solid class covering the basics of tabular Reinforcement Learning.

They follow the Sutton and Barto book pretty closely, so they start with some dummy examples to demonstrate things. The real interesting stuff isn't until a later course.

By Damian K

Sep 1, 2019

Slow means smooth. Smooth means fast. This course introduces you efficiently into the world of RL. And this is what you want. Everything is perfectly to the point. All exercise are here to boost your understanding. Highly recommended.

By Vedant D

Oct 29, 2020

This course provides a good fundamental knowledge about the Reinforcement Learning. The source material, RL by Sutton and Barto, provides very good intuition od concepts with examples and also explains every topic in much detail.

By MIN-CHUN W

May 31, 2020

Course contents are good and easy to understand. Textbook is really a good supplement to lecture videos. Assignment difficulties are between being easy and moderate. It's really fun and encouraging when completing the assignments.

By Naveen M N S

Sep 9, 2019

The pattern of this course is amazing. Each video is short and has a specific objective that's clearly stated. This approach to teaching made tough topics look easy. Assignments and quizzes were doable. Amazing experience overall!

By Surya K

Apr 5, 2020

Course was beautifully made. I tried to learn RL from multiple different courses but I couldn't understand them. This course was different however, the assignments were made in a way that helped me understand concepts concretely.

By Ola D

Apr 13, 2022

Excellent!

Very good videos, very pedagogical teachers!

Very good book!

Looking forward to upcoming courses

This (in competition with the Data structures and algorithms specialization) is the best I have seen yet on Coursera!

By Sharath K

Jun 20, 2021

This is the best course I've found on RL. The lectures are to the point and both the lecturers are very good. The best part however is the graded assignments at the end of each week where we get to apply everything we learnt.