A text for a first graduate course in real analysis for students in pure and applied mathematics, statistics, education, engineering, and economics.

This very well written and accessible book emphasizes the reasons for studying measure theory, which is the foundation of much of probability. By focusing on measure, many illustrative examples and applications, including a thorough discussion of standard probability distributions and densities, are opened. The book also includes many problems and their fully worked solutions.

The choice of examples used in this text clearly illustrate its use for a one-year graduate course. The material to be presented in the classroom constitutes a little more than half the text, while the rest of the text provides background, offers different routes that could be pursued in the classroom, as well as additional material that is appropriate for self-study. Of particular interest is a presentation of the major central limit theorems via Steins method either prior to or alternative to a characteristic function presentation. Additionally, there is considerable emphasis placed on the quantile function as well as the distribution function, with both the bootstrap and trimming presented. The section on martingales covers censored data martingales.

This book addresses fixed point theory, a fascinating and far-reaching field with applications in several areas of mathematics. The content is divided into two main parts. The first, which is more theoretical, develops the main abstract theorems on the existence and uniqueness of fixed points of maps. In turn, the second part focuses on applications, covering a large variety of significant results ranging from ordinary differential equations in Banach spaces, to partial differential equations, operator theory, functional analysis, measure theory, and game theory. A final section containing 50 problems, many of which include helpful hints, rounds out the coverage. Intended for Master’s and PhD students in Mathematics or, more generally, mathematically oriented subjects, the book is designed to be largely self-contained, although some mathematical background is needed: readers should be familiar with measure theory, Banach and Hilbert spaces, locally convex topological vector spaces and, in general, with linear functional analysis.

Reinforcement learning is a learning paradigm concerned with learning to control a system so as to maximize a numerical performance measure that expresses a long-term objective. What distinguishes reinforcement learning from supervised learning is that only partial feedback is given to the learner about the learner's predictions. Further, the predictions may have long term effects through influencing the future state of the controlled system. Thus, time plays a special role. The goal in reinforcement learning is to develop efficient learning algorithms, as well as to understand the algorithms' merits and limitations. Reinforcement learning is of great interest because of the large number of practical applications that it can be used to address, ranging from problems in artificial intelligence to operations research or control engineering. In this book, we focus on those algorithms of reinforcement learning that build on the powerful theory of dynamic programming. We give a fairly comprehensive catalog of learning problems, describe the core ideas, note a large number of state of the art algorithms, followed by the discussion of their theoretical properties and limitations. Table of Contents: Markov Decision Processes / Value Prediction Problems / Control / For Further Exploration

An integrated package of powerful probabilistic tools and key applications in modern mathematical data science.