English

Adaptive strategy in Kelly's horse races model

Statistical Mechanics 2022-10-05 v2

Abstract

We formulate an adaptive version of Kelly's horse model in which the gambler learns from past race results using Bayesian inference. A known asymptotic scaling for the difference between the growth rate of the gambler and the optimal growth rate, known as the gambler'sregret, is recovered. We show how this adaptive strategy is related to the universal portfolio strategy, and we build improved adaptive strategies in which the gambler exploits information contained in the bookmaker odds distribution to reduce his/her initial loss of the capital during the learning phase.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.03387,
  title  = {Adaptive strategy in Kelly's horse races model},
  author = {Armand Despons and David Lacoste and Luca Peliti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.03387},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

13 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:44:59.885Z