UCB Exploration for Fixed-Budget Bayesian Best Arm Identification

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Zhu, Rong J. B., Qiu, Yanqi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866913560488050688
author Zhu, Rong J. B.
Qiu, Yanqi
author_facet Zhu, Rong J. B.
Qiu, Yanqi
contents We study best-arm identification (BAI) in the fixed-budget setting. Adaptive allocations based on upper confidence bounds (UCBs), such as UCBE, are known to work well in BAI. However, it is well-known that its optimal regret is theoretically dependent on instances, which we show to be an artifact in many fixed-budget BAI problems. In this paper we propose an UCB exploration algorithm that is both theoretically and empirically efficient for the fixed budget BAI problem under a Bayesian setting. The key idea is to learn prior information, which can enhance the performance of UCB-based BAI algorithm as it has done in the cumulative regret minimization problem. We establish bounds on the failure probability and the simple regret for the Bayesian BAI problem, providing upper bounds of order $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{K/n})$, up to logarithmic factors, where $n$ represents the budget and $K$ denotes the number of arms. Furthermore, we demonstrate through empirical results that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_04869
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UCB Exploration for Fixed-Budget Bayesian Best Arm Identification
Zhu, Rong J. B.
Qiu, Yanqi
Machine Learning
We study best-arm identification (BAI) in the fixed-budget setting. Adaptive allocations based on upper confidence bounds (UCBs), such as UCBE, are known to work well in BAI. However, it is well-known that its optimal regret is theoretically dependent on instances, which we show to be an artifact in many fixed-budget BAI problems. In this paper we propose an UCB exploration algorithm that is both theoretically and empirically efficient for the fixed budget BAI problem under a Bayesian setting. The key idea is to learn prior information, which can enhance the performance of UCB-based BAI algorithm as it has done in the cumulative regret minimization problem. We establish bounds on the failure probability and the simple regret for the Bayesian BAI problem, providing upper bounds of order $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{K/n})$, up to logarithmic factors, where $n$ represents the budget and $K$ denotes the number of arms. Furthermore, we demonstrate through empirical results that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
title UCB Exploration for Fixed-Budget Bayesian Best Arm Identification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04869