Related papers: Inference for Batched Bandits
Spectral estimation is an important tool in time series analysis, with applications including economics, astronomy, and climatology. The asymptotic theory for non-parametric estimation is well-known but the development of non-asymptotic…
Adaptive designs for multi-armed clinical trials have become increasingly popular recently in many areas of medical research because of their potential to shorten development times and to increase patient response. However, developing…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation from batched contextual bandit data with multidimensional actions, often termed slates. The problem is common to recommender systems and user-interface optimization, and it is particularly…
The least trimmed squares (LTS) estimator is popular in location, regression, machine learning, and AI literature. Despite the empirical version of least trimmed squares (LTS) being repeatedly studied in the literature, the population…
Recent growing adoption of experimentation in practice has led to a surge of attention to multiarmed bandits as a technique to reduce the opportunity cost of online experiments. In this setting, a decision-maker sequentially chooses among a…
Multi-armed bandits are one of the theoretical pillars of reinforcement learning. Recently, the investigation of quantum algorithms for multi-armed bandit problems was started, and it was found that a quadratic speed-up (in query…
Modern stochastic optimization methods often rely on uniform sampling which is agnostic to the underlying characteristics of the data. This might degrade the convergence by yielding estimates that suffer from a high variance. A possible…
The combinatorial pure exploration of causal bandits is the following online learning task: given a causal graph with unknown causal inference distributions, in each round we choose a subset of variables to intervene or do no intervention,…
The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…
The bootstrap provides a simple and powerful means of assessing the quality of estimators. However, in settings involving large datasets, the computation of bootstrap-based quantities can be prohibitively demanding. As an alternative, we…
We explicitly quantify the empirically observed phenomenon that estimation under a stochastic block model (SBM) is hard if the model contains classes that are similar. More precisely, we consider estimation of certain functionals of random…
We study safe linear bandits (SLBs), where an agent selects actions from a convex set to maximize an unknown linear objective subject to unknown linear constraints in each round. Existing methods for SLBs provide strong regret guarantees,…
We establish an asymptotic framework for the statistical analysis of the stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit problem (CMAB), which is widely employed in adaptively randomized experiments across various fields. While algorithms for…
Subsampling is an effective approach to alleviate the computational burden associated with large-scale datasets. Nevertheless, existing subsampling estimators incur a substantial loss in estimation efficiency compared to estimators based on…
Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…
This paper investigates a hitherto unaddressed aspect of best arm identification (BAI) in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed-confidence setting. Two key metrics for assessing bandit algorithms are computational efficiency and…
A major research direction in contextual bandits is to develop algorithms that are computationally efficient, yet support flexible, general-purpose function approximation. Algorithms based on modeling rewards have shown strong empirical…
Contextual bandits are a core technology for personalized mobile health interventions, where decision-making requires adapting to complex, non-linear user behaviors. While Thompson Sampling (TS) is a preferred strategy for these problems,…
Algorithm selection is typically based on models of algorithm performance, learned during a separate offline training sequence, which can be prohibitively expensive. In recent work, we adopted an online approach, in which a performance…
The paper introduces a Bayesian estimation method for quantile regression in univariate ordinal models. Two algorithms are presented that utilize the latent variable inferential framework of Albert and Chib (1993) and the normal-exponential…