Related papers: Inference for Batched Bandits
Sequential data collection has emerged as a widely adopted technique for enhancing the efficiency of data gathering processes. Despite its advantages, such data collection mechanism often introduces complexities to the statistical inference…
Estimation and inference in statistics pose significant challenges when data are collected adaptively. Even in linear models, the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimator may fail to exhibit asymptotic normality for single coordinate…
The advantages of adaptive experiments have led to their rapid adoption in economics, other fields, as well as among practitioners. However, adaptive experiments pose challenges for causal inference. This note suggests a BOLS (batched…
Multi-arm bandit experimental designs are increasingly being adopted over standard randomized trials due to their potential to improve outcomes for study participants, enable faster identification of the best-performing options, and/or…
Bandit algorithms are increasingly used in real-world sequential decision-making problems. Associated with this is an increased desire to be able to use the resulting datasets to answer scientific questions like: Did one type of ad lead to…
The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained via a behavior policy. However, because the contextual bandit algorithm updates the policy based on past observations, the samples are not…
During online decision making in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), one needs to conduct inference on the true mean reward of each arm based on data collected so far at each step. However, since the arms are adaptively selected--thereby yielding…
Multi-arm bandits are gaining popularity as they enable real-world sequential decision-making across application areas, including clinical trials, recommender systems, and online decision-making. Consequently, there is an increased desire…
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 present a new finite-time analysis of the estimation error of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimator for stable linear time-invariant systems. We characterize the number of observed samples (the length of the observed trajectory)…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…
We prove that the ordinary least-squares (OLS) estimator attains nearly minimax optimal performance for the identification of linear dynamical systems from a single observed trajectory. Our upper bound relies on a generalization of…
Online decision-making problem requires us to make a sequence of decisions based on incremental information. Common solutions often need to learn a reward model of different actions given the contextual information and then maximize the…
In the fixed budget thresholding bandit problem, an algorithm sequentially allocates a budgeted number of samples to different distributions. It then predicts whether the mean of each distribution is larger or lower than a given threshold.…
When data is collected in an adaptive manner, even simple methods like ordinary least squares can exhibit non-normal asymptotic behavior. As an undesirable consequence, hypothesis tests and confidence intervals based on asymptotic normality…
Standard bandit algorithms that assume continual reallocation of measurement effort are challenging to implement due to delayed feedback and infrastructural/organizational difficulties. Motivated by practical instances involving a handful…
In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…
This study addresses the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) from dependent samples obtained via the bandit algorithm. The goal of OPE is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained from behavior policies generated by the…
Ordinary least squares (OLS) estimators are widely used in network experiments to estimate spillover effects. We study the causal interpretation of, and inference for the OLS estimator under both design-based uncertainty from random…
The evaluation of hyperparameters, neural architectures, or data augmentation policies becomes a critical model selection problem in advanced deep learning with a large hyperparameter search space. In this paper, we propose an efficient and…