Related papers: Sequential estimation of quantiles with applicatio…
We consider the infinite-horizon, average-reward restless bandit problem in discrete time. We propose a new class of policies that are designed to drive a progressively larger subset of arms toward the optimal distribution. We show that our…
The Indexed Minimum Empirical Divergence (IMED) algorithm is a highly effective approach that offers a stronger theoretical guarantee of the asymptotic optimality compared to the Kullback--Leibler Upper Confidence Bound (KL-UCB) algorithm…
In this paper, we propose new sequential estimation methods based on inclusion principle. The main idea is to reformulate the estimation problems as constructing sequential random intervals and use confidence sequences to control the…
Ratio of medians or other suitable quantiles of two distributions is widely used in medical research to compare treatment and control groups or in economics to compare various economic variables when repeated cross-sectional data are…
Learning from prior tasks and transferring that experience to improve future performance is critical for building lifelong learning agents. Although results in supervised and reinforcement learning show that transfer may significantly…
In the Best-$K$ identification problem (Best-$K$-Arm), we are given $N$ stochastic bandit arms with unknown reward distributions. Our goal is to identify the $K$ arms with the largest means with high confidence, by drawing samples from the…
We consider a class of restless bandit problems that finds a broad application area in reinforcement learning and stochastic optimization. We consider $N$ independent discrete-time Markov processes, each of which had two possible states: 1…
Partial monitoring is an expressive framework for sequential decision-making with an abundance of applications, including graph-structured and dueling bandits, dynamic pricing and transductive feedback models. We survey and extend recent…
We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…
Estimating the mode of a unimodal distribution is a classical problem in statistics. Although there are several approaches for point-estimation of mode in the literature, very little has been explored about the interval-estimation of mode.…
We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit environment when each arm is a time-homogeneous and ergodic discrete-time Markov process on a common, finite state space. The state evolution on each arm is governed…
We study a sequential resource allocation problem between a fixed number of arms. On each iteration the algorithm distributes a resource among the arms in order to maximize the expected success rate. Allocating more of the resource to a…
We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed budget in stochastic multi-armed bandits with Bernoulli rewards. For the problem with two arms, also known as the A/B testing problem, we prove that there is no algorithm that (i)…
This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…
Machine learning models are often evaluated using point estimates of performance metrics such as accuracy, F1 score, or mean squared error. Such summaries fail to capture the inherent variability induced by stochastic elements of the…
We study the Bandit Clustering (BC) problem under the fixed confidence setting, where the objective is to group a collection of data sequences (arms) into clusters through sequential sampling from adaptively selected arms at each time step…
Adaptively collected data has become ubiquitous within modern practice. However, even seemingly benign adaptive sampling schemes can introduce severe biases, rendering traditional statistical inference tools inapplicable. This can be…
We study statistical inference and distributionally robust solution methods for stochastic optimization problems, focusing on confidence intervals for optimal values and solutions that achieve exact coverage asymptotically. We develop a…
Motivated by A/B/n testing applications, we consider a finite set of distributions (called \emph{arms}), one of which is treated as a \emph{control}. We assume that the population is stratified into homogeneous subpopulations. At every time…
In multi-armed bandits, the tasks of reward maximization and pure exploration are often at odds with each other. The former focuses on exploiting arms with the highest means, while the latter may require constant exploration across all…