welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Reinforcement Learning for Business. I’m excited to have you on this journey to explore how we can use one of the most powerful areas of AI to solve meaningful, real-world challenges.
To get the most from this book, you should have a basic knowledge of Python programming. While not strictly required, a general understanding of machine learning concepts will be beneficial.
I decided to write this book because I saw a major gap in the available resources on Reinforcement Learning. Most books focus on theory or use examples from the world of games, which can feel abstract. This book takes a different approach. We use practical problems inspired by business—like optimizing supply chains or setting prices—to make the core ideas of RL intuitive and easy to grasp.
And while we use business optimization as our theme, this book is for anyone seeking a practical, hands-on path to mastering Reinforcement Learning. The challenges of resource allocation, scheduling, and dynamic response are universal in software and data science. By grounding the concepts in tangible examples, you'll gain a deep, intuitive understanding of RL that you can apply anywhere, far beyond the specific case studies in the book. You'll learn how to frame a problem, design a custom environment to simulate it, and apply a range of powerful RL algorithms to find optimal solutions.