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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Guo, Yongyi, Xu, Ziping, Murphy, Susan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.13916
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author Guo, Yongyi
Xu, Ziping
Murphy, Susan
author_facet Guo, Yongyi
Xu, Ziping
Murphy, Susan
contents We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications where the true context for decision-making is unobserved, and only a prediction of the context by a potentially complex machine learning algorithm is available. When the context error is non-vanishing, classical bandit algorithms fail to achieve sublinear regret. We propose the first online algorithm in this setting with sublinear regret guarantees under mild conditions. The key idea is to extend the measurement error model in classical statistics to the online decision-making setting, which is nontrivial due to the policy being dependent on the noisy context observations. We further demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach in simulation environments based on synthetic and real digital intervention datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_13916
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Online learning in bandits with predicted context
Guo, Yongyi
Xu, Ziping
Murphy, Susan
Machine Learning
We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications where the true context for decision-making is unobserved, and only a prediction of the context by a potentially complex machine learning algorithm is available. When the context error is non-vanishing, classical bandit algorithms fail to achieve sublinear regret. We propose the first online algorithm in this setting with sublinear regret guarantees under mild conditions. The key idea is to extend the measurement error model in classical statistics to the online decision-making setting, which is nontrivial due to the policy being dependent on the noisy context observations. We further demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach in simulation environments based on synthetic and real digital intervention datasets.
title Online learning in bandits with predicted context
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.13916