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Thompson Sampling for Linear Bandit Problems with Normal-Gamma Priors

Machine Learning 2023-03-07 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

We consider Thompson sampling for linear bandit problems with finitely many independent arms, where rewards are sampled from normal distributions that are linearly dependent on unknown parameter vectors and with unknown variance. Specifically, with a Bayesian formulation we consider multivariate normal-gamma priors to represent environment uncertainty for all involved parameters. We show that our chosen sampling prior is a conjugate prior to the reward model and derive a Bayesian regret bound for Thompson sampling under the condition that the 5/2-moment of the variance distribution exist.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.03348,
  title  = {Thompson Sampling for Linear Bandit Problems with Normal-Gamma Priors},
  author = {Björn Lindenberg and Karl-Olof Lindahl},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.03348},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

27 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T09:04:02.189Z