Related papers: Contextual Pandora's Box
Two central problems in Stochastic Optimization are Min Sum Set Cover and Pandora's Box. In Pandora's Box, we are presented with $n$ boxes, each containing an unknown value and the goal is to open the boxes in some order to minimize the sum…
We consider online variations of the Pandora's box problem (Weitzman. 1979), a standard model for understanding issues related to the cost of acquiring information for decision-making. Our problem generalizes both the classic Pandora's box…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
The Pandora's Box problem and its extensions capture optimization problems with stochastic input where the algorithm can obtain instantiations of input random variables at some cost. To our knowledge, all previous work on this class of…
The Pandora's box problem (Weitzman 1979) is a core model in economic theory that captures an agent's (Pandora's) search for the best alternative (box). We study an important generalization of the problem where the agent can either fully…
In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…
The Prophet Inequality and Pandora's Box problems are fundamental stochastic problem with applications in Mechanism Design, Online Algorithms, Stochastic Optimization, Optimal Stopping, and Operations Research. A usual assumption in these…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…
The Pandora's Box Problem, originally formalized by Weitzman in 1979, models selection from set of random, alternative options, when evaluation is costly. This includes, for example, the problem of hiring a skilled worker, where only one…
Motivated by stochastic optimization, we introduce the problem of learning from samples of contextual value distributions. A contextual value distribution can be understood as a family of real-valued distributions, where each sample…
We study the Pandora's Box problem in an online learning setting with semi-bandit feedback. In each round, the learner sequentially pays to open up to $n$ boxes with unknown reward distributions, observes rewards upon opening, and decides…
Pandora's Box is a central problem in decision making under uncertainty that can model various real life scenarios. In this problem we are given $n$ boxes, each with a fixed opening cost, and an unknown value drawn from a known…
We introduce a stochastic contextual bandit model where at each time step the environment chooses a distribution over a context set and samples the context from this distribution. The learner observes only the context distribution while the…
We consider the problem of designing contextual bandit algorithms in the ``cross-learning'' setting of Balseiro et al., where the learner observes the loss for the action they play in all possible contexts, not just the context of the…
We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…
To address the contextual bandit problem, we propose an online random forest algorithm. The analysis of the proposed algorithm is based on the sample complexity needed to find the optimal decision stump. Then, the decision stumps are…
Multi-dimensional online decision making plays a crucial role in many real applications such as online recommendation and digital marketing. In these problems, a decision at each time is a combination of choices from different types of…
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…
Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…
We investigate the role of inaccurate priors for the classical Pandora's box problem. In the classical Pandora's box problem we are given a set of boxes each with a known cost and an unknown value sampled from a known distribution. We…