Chapter 12. Deep Reinforcement Learning in Ad Tech

So far in this unit of discussing reinforcement learning application research domains, we saw how reinforcement learning is disrupting the field of robotics, autonomous driving, financial portfolio management, and solving games of extremely high complexity, such as Go. Another important domain which is likely to be disrupted by reinforcement learning is advertisement technology.

Before getting into the details of the problem statement and it's solution based on reinforcement learning, let's understand the challenges, business models, and bidding strategies involved, which will work as a basic prerequisite in understanding the problem that we will try to solve using a reinforcement learning framework. The topics that we will be covering in this chapter are as follows:

• Computational advertising challenges and bidding strategies

• Real-time bidding by reinforcement learning in display advertising