Causal Contextual Bandits with Adaptive Context

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Madhavan, Rahul, Maiti, Aurghya, Sinha, Gaurav, Barman, Siddharth
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911900189589504
author Madhavan, Rahul
Maiti, Aurghya
Sinha, Gaurav
Barman, Siddharth
author_facet Madhavan, Rahul
Maiti, Aurghya
Sinha, Gaurav
Barman, Siddharth
contents We study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic context is revealed by the environment. Following this, the learner then selects a final action and receives a reward. Given $T$ rounds of interactions with the environment, the objective of the learner is to learn a policy (of selecting the initial and the final action) with maximum expected reward. In this paper we study the specific situation where every action corresponds to intervening on a node in some known causal graph. We extend prior work from the deterministic context setting to obtain simple regret minimization guarantees. This is achieved through an instance-dependent causal parameter, $λ$, which characterizes our upper bound. Furthermore, we prove that our simple regret is essentially tight for a large class of instances. A key feature of our work is that we use convex optimization to address the bandit exploration problem. We also conduct experiments to validate our theoretical results, and release our code at our project GitHub repository: https://github.com/adaptiveContextualCausalBandits/aCCB.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_18626
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Contextual Bandits with Adaptive Context
Madhavan, Rahul
Maiti, Aurghya
Sinha, Gaurav
Barman, Siddharth
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic context is revealed by the environment. Following this, the learner then selects a final action and receives a reward. Given $T$ rounds of interactions with the environment, the objective of the learner is to learn a policy (of selecting the initial and the final action) with maximum expected reward. In this paper we study the specific situation where every action corresponds to intervening on a node in some known causal graph. We extend prior work from the deterministic context setting to obtain simple regret minimization guarantees. This is achieved through an instance-dependent causal parameter, $λ$, which characterizes our upper bound. Furthermore, we prove that our simple regret is essentially tight for a large class of instances. A key feature of our work is that we use convex optimization to address the bandit exploration problem. We also conduct experiments to validate our theoretical results, and release our code at our project GitHub repository: https://github.com/adaptiveContextualCausalBandits/aCCB.
title Causal Contextual Bandits with Adaptive Context
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18626