Identifying the Best Arm in the Presence of Global Environment Shifts

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Hauptverfasser: Srisawad, Phurinut, Branke, Juergen, Tran-Thanh, Long
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Srisawad, Phurinut
Branke, Juergen
Tran-Thanh, Long
author_facet Srisawad, Phurinut
Branke, Juergen
Tran-Thanh, Long
contents This paper formulates a new Best-Arm Identification problem in the non-stationary stochastic bandits setting, where the means of all arms are shifted in the same way due to a global influence of the environment. The aim is to identify the unique best arm across environmental change given a fixed total budget. While this setting can be regarded as a special case of Adversarial Bandits or Corrupted Bandits, we demonstrate that existing solutions tailored to those settings do not fully utilise the nature of this global influence, and thus, do not work well in practice (despite their theoretical guarantees). To overcome this issue, in this paper we develop a novel selection policy that is consistent and robust in dealing with global environmental shifts. We then propose an allocation policy, LinLUCB, which exploits information about global shifts across all arms in each environment. Empirical tests depict a significant improvement in our policies against other existing methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_12581
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifying the Best Arm in the Presence of Global Environment Shifts
Srisawad, Phurinut
Branke, Juergen
Tran-Thanh, Long
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
This paper formulates a new Best-Arm Identification problem in the non-stationary stochastic bandits setting, where the means of all arms are shifted in the same way due to a global influence of the environment. The aim is to identify the unique best arm across environmental change given a fixed total budget. While this setting can be regarded as a special case of Adversarial Bandits or Corrupted Bandits, we demonstrate that existing solutions tailored to those settings do not fully utilise the nature of this global influence, and thus, do not work well in practice (despite their theoretical guarantees). To overcome this issue, in this paper we develop a novel selection policy that is consistent and robust in dealing with global environmental shifts. We then propose an allocation policy, LinLUCB, which exploits information about global shifts across all arms in each environment. Empirical tests depict a significant improvement in our policies against other existing methods.
title Identifying the Best Arm in the Presence of Global Environment Shifts
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12581