Non-Stationary Latent Auto-Regressive Bandits

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Trella, Anna L., Dempsey, Walter, Gazi, Asim H., Xu, Ziping, Doshi-Velez, Finale, Murphy, Susan A.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Trella, Anna L.
Dempsey, Walter
Gazi, Asim H.
Xu, Ziping
Doshi-Velez, Finale
Murphy, Susan A.
author_facet Trella, Anna L.
Dempsey, Walter
Gazi, Asim H.
Xu, Ziping
Doshi-Velez, Finale
Murphy, Susan A.
contents For the non-stationary multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, many existing methods allow a general mechanism for the non-stationarity, but rely on a budget for the non-stationarity that is sub-linear to the total number of time steps $T$. In many real-world settings, however, the mechanism for the non-stationarity can be modeled, but there is no budget for the non-stationarity. We instead consider the non-stationary bandit problem where the reward means change due to a latent, auto-regressive (AR) state. We develop Latent AR LinUCB (LARL), an online linear contextual bandit algorithm that does not rely on the non-stationary budget, but instead forms good predictions of reward means by implicitly predicting the latent state. The key idea is to reduce the problem to a linear dynamical system which can be solved as a linear contextual bandit. In fact, LARL approximates a steady-state Kalman filter and efficiently learns system parameters online. We provide an interpretable regret bound for LARL with respect to the level of non-stationarity in the environment. LARL achieves sub-linear regret in this setting if the noise variance of the latent state process is sufficiently small with respect to $T$. Empirically, LARL outperforms various baseline methods in this non-stationary bandit problem.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03110
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Non-Stationary Latent Auto-Regressive Bandits
Trella, Anna L.
Dempsey, Walter
Gazi, Asim H.
Xu, Ziping
Doshi-Velez, Finale
Murphy, Susan A.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
For the non-stationary multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, many existing methods allow a general mechanism for the non-stationarity, but rely on a budget for the non-stationarity that is sub-linear to the total number of time steps $T$. In many real-world settings, however, the mechanism for the non-stationarity can be modeled, but there is no budget for the non-stationarity. We instead consider the non-stationary bandit problem where the reward means change due to a latent, auto-regressive (AR) state. We develop Latent AR LinUCB (LARL), an online linear contextual bandit algorithm that does not rely on the non-stationary budget, but instead forms good predictions of reward means by implicitly predicting the latent state. The key idea is to reduce the problem to a linear dynamical system which can be solved as a linear contextual bandit. In fact, LARL approximates a steady-state Kalman filter and efficiently learns system parameters online. We provide an interpretable regret bound for LARL with respect to the level of non-stationarity in the environment. LARL achieves sub-linear regret in this setting if the noise variance of the latent state process is sufficiently small with respect to $T$. Empirically, LARL outperforms various baseline methods in this non-stationary bandit problem.
title Non-Stationary Latent Auto-Regressive Bandits
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03110