Offline Clustering of Linear Bandits: The Power of Clusters under Limited Data
Abstract
Contextual multi-armed bandit is a fundamental learning framework for making a sequence of decisions, e.g., advertising recommendations for a sequence of arriving users. Recent works have shown that clustering these users based on the similarity of their learned preferences can accelerate the learning. However, prior work has primarily focused on the online setting, which requires continually collecting user data, ignoring the offline data widely available in many applications. To tackle these limitations, we study the offline clustering of bandits (Off-ClusBand) problem, which studies how to use the offline dataset to learn cluster properties and improve decision-making. The key challenge in Off-ClusBand arises from data insufficiency for users: unlike the online case where we continually learn from online data, in the offline case, we have a fixed, limited dataset to work from and thus must determine whether we have enough data to confidently cluster users together. To address this challenge, we propose two algorithms: Off-C2LUB, which we show analytically and experimentally outperforms existing methods under limited offline user data, and Off-CLUB, which may incur bias when data is sparse but performs well and nearly matches the lower bound when data is sufficient. We experimentally validate these results on both real and synthetic datasets.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.19043,
title = {Offline Clustering of Linear Bandits: The Power of Clusters under Limited Data},
author = {Jingyuan Liu and Zeyu Zhang and Xuchuang Wang and Xutong Liu and John C. S. Lui and Mohammad Hajiesmaili and Carlee Joe-Wong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.19043},
year = {2025}
}