Related papers: Statistical Inference for Online Decision-Making: …
With the fast development of big data, learning the optimal decision rule by recursively updating it and making online decisions has been easier than before. We study the online statistical inference of model parameters in a contextual…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
This paper investigates regret minimization, statistical inference, and their interplay in high-dimensional online decision-making based on the sparse linear context bandit model. We integrate the $\varepsilon$-greedy bandit algorithm for…
We study contextual bandits with finitely many actions in which the reward of each arm follows a single-index model with an arm-specific index parameter and an unknown nonparametric link function. We consider a regime in which arms…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
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…
We propose a contextual bandit based model to capture the learning and social welfare goals of a web platform in the presence of myopic users. By using payments to incentivize these agents to explore different items/recommendations, we show…
We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…
The analysis of online least squares estimation is at the heart of many stochastic sequential decision making problems. We employ tools from the self-normalized processes to provide a simple and self-contained proof of a tail bound of a…
We study the off-policy evaluation problem---estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy---under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model…
The study of online decision-making problems that leverage contextual information has drawn notable attention due to their significant applications in fields ranging from healthcare to autonomous systems. In modern applications, contextual…
The deployment of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) has become commonplace in many economic applications. However, regret guarantees for even state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms (such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit…
We propose to address the common problem of linear estimation in linear statistical models by using a model selection approach via penalization. Depending then on the framework in which the linear statistical model is considered namely the…
Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…
To investigate a dilemma of statistical and computational efficiency faced by long-run variance estimators, we propose a decomposition of kernel weights in a quadratic form and some online inference principles. These proposals allow us to…
Bandits with feedback graphs are powerful online learning models that interpolate between the full information and classic bandit problems, capturing many real-life applications. A recent work by Zhang et al. (2023) studies the contextual…
Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…
We study the problem of offline learning in automated decision systems under the contextual bandits model. We are given logged historical data consisting of contexts, (randomized) actions, and (nonnegative) rewards. A common goal is to…
Personalized services are central to today's digital economy, and their sequential decisions are often modeled as contextual bandits. Modern applications pose two main challenges: high-dimensional covariates and the need for nonparametric…
Optimizing an interactive system against a predefined online metric is particularly challenging, when the metric is computed from user feedback such as clicks and payments. The key challenge is the counterfactual nature: in the case of Web…