Related papers: Treatment Choice with Nonlinear Regret
We consider the problem of online learning in Linear Quadratic Control systems whose state transition and state-action transition matrices $A$ and $B$ may be initially unknown. We devise an online learning algorithm and provide guarantees…
We consider the fixed-budget best arm identification problem with rewards following normal distributions. In this problem, the forecaster is given $K$ arms (or treatments) and $T$ time steps. The forecaster attempts to find the arm with the…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
Mechanism design has found considerable application to the construction of agent-interaction protocols. In the standard setting, the type (e.g., utility function) of an agent is not known by other agents, nor is it known by the mechanism…
A common challenge for decision makers is selecting actions whose rewards are unknown and evolve over time based on prior policies. For instance, repeated use may reduce an action's effectiveness (habituation), while inactivity may restore…
Motivated by practical applications, chiefly clinical trials, we study the regret achievable for stochastic bandits under the constraint that the employed policy must split trials into a small number of batches. We propose a simple policy,…
Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…
Because many illnesses show heterogeneous response to treatment, there is increasing interest in individualizing treatment to patients [Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 66 (2009) 128--133]. An individualized treatment rule is a decision rule that…
We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…
We consider decision-making problems involving the optimization of linear objective functions with uncertain coefficients. The probability distribution of the coefficients--which are assumed to be stochastic in nature--is unknown to the…
We study continuous-time online learning where data are generated by a diffusion process with unknown coefficients. The learner employs a two-layer neural network, continuously updating its parameters in a non-anticipative manner. The…
We consider the problem of sequentially maximizing an unknown function $f$ over a set of actions of the form $(s,\mathbf{x})$, where the selected actions must satisfy a safety constraint with respect to an unknown safety function $g$. We…
The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…
We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…
We present an online learning analysis of minimax adaptive control for the case where the uncertainty includes a finite set of linear dynamical systems. Precisely, for each system inside the uncertainty set, we define the model-based regret…
We consider model selection for sequential decision making in stochastic environments with bandit feedback, where a meta-learner has at its disposal a pool of base learners, and decides on the fly which action to take based on the policies…
This paper studies the stochastic linear bandit problem, where a decision-maker chooses actions from possibly time-dependent sets of vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and receives noisy rewards. The objective is to minimize regret, the difference…
We propose a new modeling and estimation approach to select the optimal treatment regime from different options through constructing a robust estimating equation. The method is protected against misspecification of the propensity score…
We study sequential experiments where sampling is costly and a decision-maker aims to determine the best treatment for full scale implementation by (1) adaptively allocating units between two possible treatments, and (2) stopping the…
It is common to encounter the situation with uncertainty for decision makers (DMs) in dealing with a complex decision making problem. The existing evidence shows that people usually fear the extreme uncertainty named as the unknown. This…