Reinforcement Learning Starts to Deliver on Its Promise

Summary: Advances in very low cost compute and Model Based Reinforcement Learning make this modeling technique that much closer to adoption in the practical world. We keep asking if this is the year for reinforcement learning (RL) to finally make good on its many promises. Like flying cars and jet packs the answer always seems to be at least a couple of years away. If your history with data science goes back to late-aughts you may remember a time when there were only two basic types of models, supervised and unsupervised. Then, quite overnight, reinforcement learning was added as a third leg to this new stool.