Title
Best Arm Identification: A Unified Approach to Fixed Budget and Fixed Confidence.
Abstract
We study the problem of identifying the best arm(s) in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. This problem has been studied in the literature from two different perspectives: fixed budget and fixed confidence. We propose a unifying approach that leads to a meta-algorithm called unified gap-based exploration (UGapE), with a common structure and similar theoretical analysis for these two settings. We prove a performance bound for the two versions of the algorithm showing that the two problems are characterized by the same notion of complexity. We also show how the UGapE algorithm as well as its theoretical analysis can be extended to take into account the variance of the arms and to multiple bandits. Finally, we evaluate the performance of UGapE and compare it with a number of existing fixed budget and fixed confidence algorithms.
Year
Venue
Field
2012
NIPS
Mathematical optimization,Computer science
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
34
1.84
References 
Authors
10
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Victor Gabillon11169.51
Mohammad Ghavamzadeh281467.73
Alessandro Lazaric351848.19