Restless dependent bandits with fading memory
Abstract
We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in the case when the arm samples are dependent over time and generated from so-called weak -mixing processes. We establish a Mix Improved UCB agorithm and provide both problem-dependent and independent regret analysis in two different scenarios. In the first, so-called fast-mixing scenario, we show that pseudo-regret enjoys the same upper bound (up to a factor) as for i.i.d. observations; whereas in the second, slow mixing scenario, we discover a surprising effect, that the regret upper bound is similar to the independent case, with an incremental {\em additive} term which does not depend on the number of arms. The analysis of slow mixing scenario is supported with a minmax lower bound, which (up to a factor) matches the obtained upper bound.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1906.10454,
title = {Restless dependent bandits with fading memory},
author = {Oleksandr Zadorozhnyi and Gilles Blanchard and Alexandra Carpentier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.10454},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
30 pages