English

Restless dependent bandits with fading memory

Machine Learning 2019-06-26 v1 Machine Learning

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 \cC\cC-mixing processes. We establish a \cC\cC-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 log(T)\log(T) 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

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:02:54.975Z