Minimum Empirical Divergence for Sub-Gaussian Linear Bandits

Kapilan Balagopalan, Kwang-Sung Jun

TL;DR: New algorithm for Linear bandit with state-of-the art regret bound and competitive empirical performance

Abstract:

We propose a novel linear bandit algorithm called LinMED (Linear Minimum Empirical Divergence), which is a linear extension of the MED algorithm that was originally designed for multi-armed bandits.
LinMED is a randomized algorithm that admits a closed-form computation of the arm sampling probabilities, unlike the popular randomized algorithm called linear Thompson sampling.
Such a feature proves useful for off-policy evaluation where the unbiased evaluation requires accurately computing the sampling probability.
We prove that LinMED enjoys a near-optimal regret bound of $d\sqrt{n}$ up to logarithmic factors where $d$ is the dimension and $n$ is the time horizon.
We further show that LinMED enjoys a $\frac{d^2}{\Delta}\left(\log^2(n)\right)\log\left(\log(n)\right)$ problem-dependent regret where $\Delta$ is the smallest suboptimality gap.
Our empirical study shows that LinMED has a competitive performance with the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Submission Number: 542