English
Related papers

Related papers: Adaptive Experimental Design for Policy Learning

200 papers

We propose a novel technique for analyzing adaptive sampling called the {\em Simulator}. Our approach differs from the existing methods by considering not how much information could be gathered by any fixed sampling strategy, but how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson , Benjamin Recht

I study the problem of a decision maker choosing a policy which allocates treatment to a heterogeneous population on the basis of experimental data that includes only a subset of possible treatment values. The effects of new treatments are…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-17 Samuel Higbee

We consider the "policy choice" problem -- otherwise known as best arm identification in the bandit literature -- proposed by Kasy and Sautmann (2021) for adaptive experimental design. Theorem 1 of Kasy and Sautmann (2021) provides three…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-11-25 Kaito Ariu , Masahiro Kato , Junpei Komiyama , Kenichiro McAlinn , Chao Qin

Clinical trials are an instrument for making informed decisions based on evidence from well-designed experiments. Here we consider adaptive designs mainly from the perspective of multi-arm Phase II clinical trials, in which one or more…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-08-31 Elja Arjas , Dario Gasbarra

In this paper, we study a best arm identification problem with dual objects. In addition to the classic reward, each arm is associated with a cost distribution and the goal is to identify the largest reward arm using the minimum expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Kellen Kanarios , Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Kota Srinivas Reddy , P. N. Karthik , Nikhil Karamchandani , Jayakrishnan Nair

We study fixed-confidence Best Arm Identification (BAI) in semiparametric bandits, where rewards are linear in arm features plus an unknown additive baseline shift. Unlike linear-bandit BAI, this setting requires orthogonalized regression,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-07 Seok-Jin Kim

We investigate the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem for linear bandits in a potentially non-stationary environment. Given a finite arm set $\mathcal{X}\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, a fixed budget $T$, and an unpredictable sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Zhihan Xiong , Romain Camilleri , Maryam Fazel , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson

Given n experiment subjects with potentially heterogeneous covariates and two possible treatments, namely active treatment and control, this paper addresses the fundamental question of determining the optimal accuracy in estimating the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-13 Jiachun Li , David Simchi-Levi , Yunxiao Zhao

Motivated by the cost heterogeneity in experimentation across different alternatives, we study the Best Arm Identification with Resource Constraints (BAIwRC) problem. The agent aims to identify the best arm under resource constraints, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

This paper proposes Bayesian Adaptive Trials (BAT) as both an efficient method to conduct trials and a unifying framework for evaluation social policy interventions, addressing limitations inherent in traditional methods such as Randomized…

Adaptive experiment is widely adopted to estimate conditional average treatment effect (CATE) in clinical trials and many other scenarios. While the primary goal in experiment is to maximize estimation accuracy, due to the imperative of…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-06 Jiachun Li , Kaining Shi , David Simchi-Levi

Adaptive experiments are used extensively in online platforms, healthcare and biotechnology, and a variety of other settings. In many of these applications, the main goal is not to precisely estimate a treatment effect, but to demonstrate…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Guido Imbens , Lorenzo Masoero , Alexander Rakhlin , Thomas S. Richardson , Suhas Vijaykumar

In this paper, we provide the first investigation into adaptive combinatorial experimental design, focusing on the trade-off between regret minimization and statistical power in combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB). While minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Hongrui Xie , Junyu Cao , Kan Xu

We study best-arm identification with fixed confidence in bandit models with graph smoothness constraint. We provide and analyze an efficient gradient ascent algorithm to compute the sample complexity of this problem as a solution of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-21 Tomáš Kocák , Aurélien Garivier

We study a problem of best-effort adaptation motivated by several applications and considerations, which consists of determining an accurate predictor for a target domain, for which a moderate amount of labeled samples are available, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Pranjal Awasthi , Corinna Cortes , Mehryar Mohri

We consider the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where an agent sequentially chooses actions and observes rewards for the actions it took. While the majority of algorithms try to minimize the regret, i.e., the cumulative difference between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

We consider the best arm identification problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit framework where each arm has a tiny probability of realizing large rewards while with overwhelming probability the reward is zero. A key application of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Anirban Bhattacharjee , Sushant Vijayan , Sandeep K Juneja

Stochastic multi-armed bandits are a sequential-decision-making framework, where, at each interaction step, the learner selects an arm and observes a stochastic reward. Within the context of best-arm identification (BAI) problems, the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Riccardo Poiani , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

We study $(\epsilon, \delta)$-PAC best arm identification, where a decision-maker must identify an $\epsilon$-optimal arm with probability at least $1 - \delta$, while minimizing the number of arm pulls (samples). Most of the work on this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Brijen Thananjeyan , Kirthevasan Kandasamy , Ion Stoica , Michael I. Jordan , Ken Goldberg , Joseph E. Gonzalez