Related papers: Demonstration Experiments
Adaptively collected data has become ubiquitous within modern practice. However, even seemingly benign adaptive sampling schemes can introduce severe biases, rendering traditional statistical inference tools inapplicable. This can be…
We address the problem of online sequential decision making, i.e., balancing the trade-off between exploiting the current knowledge to maximize immediate performance and exploring the new information to gain long-term benefits using the…
In multi-armed bandit problems, the typical goal is to identify the arm with the highest reward. This paper explores a threshold-based bandit problem, aiming to select an arm based on its relation to a prescribed threshold \(\tau \). We…
Over the past few years, the multi-armed bandit model has become increasingly popular in the machine learning community, partly because of applications including online content optimization. This paper reviews two different sequential…
Algorithms for hyperparameter optimization abound, all of which work well under different and often unverifiable assumptions. Motivated by the general challenge of sequentially choosing which algorithm to use, we study the more specific…
A standard assumption adopted in the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework is that the mean rewards are constant over time. This assumption can be restrictive in the business world as decision-makers often face an evolving environment where…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…
Multi-arm multi-stage trial designs can bring notable gains in efficiency to the drug development process. However, for normally distributed endpoints, the determination of a design typically depends on the assumption that the patient…
We introduce and study a new class of stochastic bandit problems, referred to as predictive bandits. In each round, the decision maker first decides whether to gather information about the rewards of particular arms (so that their rewards…
The objective of canonical multi-armed bandits is to identify and repeatedly select an arm with the largest reward, often in the form of the expected value of the arm's probability distribution. Such a utilitarian perspective and focus on…
In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…
Firms implementing digital advertising campaigns face a complex problem in determining the right match between their advertising creatives and target audiences. Typical solutions to the problem have leveraged non-experimental methods, or…
Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…
Numerous publications have now addressed the principles of designing, analyzing, and reporting the results of, stepped-wedge cluster randomized trials. In contrast, there is little research available pertaining to the design and analysis of…
Platform trials are randomized clinical trials that allow simultaneous comparison of multiple interventions, usually against a common control. Arms to test experimental interventions may enter and leave the platform over time. This implies…
Experimental design has emerged as a powerful approach for improving the sample efficiency of A/B testing, yet existing designs rely critically on correctly specified models. We study robust sequential experimental design under model…
We use the lens of weak signal asymptotics to study a class of sequentially randomized experiments, including those that arise in solving multi-armed bandit problems. In an experiment with $n$ time steps, we let the mean reward gaps between…
We study a multi-armed bandit problem where the rewards exhibit regime switching. Specifically, the distributions of the random rewards generated from all arms are modulated by a common underlying state modeled as a finite-state Markov…
Suppose an online platform wants to compare a treatment and control policy, e.g., two different matching algorithms in a ridesharing system, or two different inventory management algorithms in an online retail site. Standard randomized…
Information-directed sampling (IDS) is a powerful framework for solving bandit problems which has shown strong results in both Bayesian and frequentist settings. However, frequentist IDS, like many other bandit algorithms, requires that one…