SPEED: Experimental Design for Policy Evaluation in Linear Heteroscedastic Bandits

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mukherjee, Subhojyoti, Xie, Qiaomin, Hanna, Josiah, Nowak, Robert
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Mukherjee, Subhojyoti
Xie, Qiaomin
Hanna, Josiah
Nowak, Robert
author_facet Mukherjee, Subhojyoti
Xie, Qiaomin
Hanna, Josiah
Nowak, Robert
contents In this paper, we study the problem of optimal data collection for policy evaluation in linear bandits. In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected reward it will obtain when executed in a multi-armed bandit environment. Our work is the first work that focuses on such optimal data collection strategy for policy evaluation involving heteroscedastic reward noise in the linear bandit setting. We first formulate an optimal design for weighted least squares estimates in the heteroscedastic linear bandit setting that reduces the MSE of the value of the target policy. We then use this formulation to derive the optimal allocation of samples per action during data collection. We then introduce a novel algorithm SPEED (Structured Policy Evaluation Experimental Design) that tracks the optimal design and derive its regret with respect to the optimal design. Finally, we empirically validate that SPEED leads to policy evaluation with mean squared error comparable to the oracle strategy and significantly lower than simply running the target policy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2301_12357
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SPEED: Experimental Design for Policy Evaluation in Linear Heteroscedastic Bandits
Mukherjee, Subhojyoti
Xie, Qiaomin
Hanna, Josiah
Nowak, Robert
Machine Learning
In this paper, we study the problem of optimal data collection for policy evaluation in linear bandits. In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected reward it will obtain when executed in a multi-armed bandit environment. Our work is the first work that focuses on such optimal data collection strategy for policy evaluation involving heteroscedastic reward noise in the linear bandit setting. We first formulate an optimal design for weighted least squares estimates in the heteroscedastic linear bandit setting that reduces the MSE of the value of the target policy. We then use this formulation to derive the optimal allocation of samples per action during data collection. We then introduce a novel algorithm SPEED (Structured Policy Evaluation Experimental Design) that tracks the optimal design and derive its regret with respect to the optimal design. Finally, we empirically validate that SPEED leads to policy evaluation with mean squared error comparable to the oracle strategy and significantly lower than simply running the target policy.
title SPEED: Experimental Design for Policy Evaluation in Linear Heteroscedastic Bandits
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12357