An Upper Confidence Bound Approach to Estimating the Maximum Mean

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kun, Zhang, Guangwu, Liu, Wen, Shi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Kun, Zhang
Guangwu, Liu
Wen, Shi
author_facet Kun, Zhang
Guangwu, Liu
Wen, Shi
contents Estimating the maximum mean finds a variety of applications in practice. In this paper, we study estimation of the maximum mean using an upper confidence bound (UCB) approach where the sampling budget is adaptively allocated to one of the systems. We study in depth the existing grand average (GA) estimator, and propose a new largest-size average (LSA) estimator. Specifically, we establish statistical guarantees, including strong consistency, asymptotic mean squared errors, and central limit theorems (CLTs) for both estimators, which are new to the literature. We show that LSA is preferable over GA, as the bias of the former decays at a rate much faster than that of the latter when sample size increases. By using the CLTs, we further construct asymptotically valid confidence intervals for the maximum mean, and propose a single hypothesis test for a multiple comparison problem with application to clinical trials. Statistical efficiency of the resulting point and interval estimates and the proposed single hypothesis test is demonstrated via numerical examples.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_04179
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Upper Confidence Bound Approach to Estimating the Maximum Mean
Kun, Zhang
Guangwu, Liu
Wen, Shi
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
Estimating the maximum mean finds a variety of applications in practice. In this paper, we study estimation of the maximum mean using an upper confidence bound (UCB) approach where the sampling budget is adaptively allocated to one of the systems. We study in depth the existing grand average (GA) estimator, and propose a new largest-size average (LSA) estimator. Specifically, we establish statistical guarantees, including strong consistency, asymptotic mean squared errors, and central limit theorems (CLTs) for both estimators, which are new to the literature. We show that LSA is preferable over GA, as the bias of the former decays at a rate much faster than that of the latter when sample size increases. By using the CLTs, we further construct asymptotically valid confidence intervals for the maximum mean, and propose a single hypothesis test for a multiple comparison problem with application to clinical trials. Statistical efficiency of the resulting point and interval estimates and the proposed single hypothesis test is demonstrated via numerical examples.
title An Upper Confidence Bound Approach to Estimating the Maximum Mean
topic Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04179