TD(lambda) resource
In short and a straight forward manner, Eligibility Traces is a kind of mathematical trick that improves the performance of Temporal Difference methods, in Reinforcement Learning.
Here are the benefits of Eligibility Traces:
Provide a way of implementing Monte Carlo in online fashion (does not wait for the episode to finish) and on problems without episodes. Provide an algorithmic mechanism that uses a short-term memory vector. Computational efficiency by storing a single vector memory instead a list of feature vectors. Learning is done continually rather than waiting results at the end of an episode.
visit the following resources to learn more:
-TD(lambda) resources -Lambda Functions -TD Learning -TD (Lambda)