Related papers: Valid Post-Contextual Bandit Inference

Contextual bandit algorithms are increasingly replacing non-adaptive A/B tests in e-commerce, healthcare, and policymaking because they can both improve outcomes for study participants and increase the chance of identifying good or even…

In this paper, we study the application of the Thompson sampling (TS) methodology to the stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) framework. We first analyze the standard TS algorithm for the general CMAB model when the outcome…

We consider the inverse problem of multi-armed bandits (IMAB) that are widely used in neuroscience and psychology research for behavior modelling. We first show that the IMAB problem is not convex in general, but can be relaxed to a convex…

We consider the multi armed bandit problem in non-stationary environments. Based on the Bayesian method, we propose a variant of Thompson Sampling which can be used in both rested and restless bandit scenarios. Applying discounting to the…

Maximising the detection of intrusions is a fundamental and often critical aim of perimeter surveillance. Commonly, this requires a decision-maker to optimally allocate multiple searchers to segments of the perimeter. We consider a scenario…

Bandit algorithms are increasingly used in real-world sequential decision-making problems. Associated with this is an increased desire to be able to use the resulting datasets to answer scientific questions like: Did one type of ad lead to…

In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…

During online decision making in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), one needs to conduct inference on the true mean reward of each arm based on data collected so far at each step. However, since the arms are adaptively selected--thereby yielding…

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…

We consider the stochastic contextual bandit problem with additional regularization. The motivation comes from problems where the policy of the agent must be close to some baseline policy which is known to perform well on the task. To…

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) and causal MABs (CMAB) are established frameworks for decision-making problems. The majority of prior work typically studies and solves individual MAB and CMAB in isolation for a given problem and associated data.…

Adaptive experiments such as multi-arm bandits adapt the treatment-allocation policy and/or the decision to stop the experiment to the data observed so far. This has the potential to improve outcomes for study participants within the…

Stochastic linear bandits are a natural and simple generalisation of finite-armed bandits with numerous practical applications. Current approaches focus on generalising existing techniques for finite-armed bandits, notably the optimism…

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem in a setting where each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. As opposed to the traditional static multi-armed bandit problem, this setting allows…

This paper introduces the first asymptotically optimal strategy for a multi armed bandit (MAB) model under side constraints. The side constraints model situations in which bandit activations are limited by the availability of certain…

We propose a novel formulation of group fairness with biased feedback in the contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) setting. In the CMAB setting, a sequential decision maker must, at each time step, choose an arm to pull from a finite set of…

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…

In this paper we study a multi-arm bandit problem in which the quality of each arm is measured by the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) at some level alpha of the reward distribution. While existing works in this setting mainly focus on…

The sample mean is among the most well studied estimators in statistics, having many desirable properties such as unbiasedness and consistency. However, when analyzing data collected using a multi-armed bandit (MAB) experiment, the sample…

To understand the complexity of sequence classification tasks, Hahn et al. (2021) proposed sensitivity as the number of disjoint subsets of the input sequence that can each be individually changed to change the output. Though effective,…