Worst-case Performance of Greedy Policies in Bandits with Imperfect Context Observations

Hongju Park, Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

Abstract: Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown parameter with the context vector of that arm. The classical bandit settings heavily rely on assuming that the contexts are fully observed, while the study of the richer model of imperfectly observed contextual bandits is immature. This work considers Greedy reinforcement learning policies that take action as if the current estimates of the parameter and of the unobserved contexts coincide with the corresponding true values. We establish that the non-asymptotic worst-case regret grows poly-logarithmically with the time horizon and the failure probability, while it scales linearly with the number of arms. Numerical analysis showcasing the above efficiency of Greedy policies is also provided.