Title
Pure exploration in multi-armed bandits problems
Abstract
We consider the framework of stochastic multi-armed bandit problems and study the possibilities and limitations of strategies that perform an online exploration of the arms. The strategies are assessed in terms of their simple regret, a regret notion that captures the fact that exploration is only constrained by the number of available rounds (not necessarily known in advance), in contrast to the case when the cumulative regret is considered and when exploitation needs to be performed at the same time.We believe that this performance criterion is suited to situations when the cost of pulling an arm is expressed in terms of resources rather than rewards. We discuss the links between the simple and the cumulative regret. The main result is that the required exploration-exploitation trade-offs are qualitatively different, in view of a general lower bound on the simple regret in terms of the cumulative regret.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2008
ALT'09 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Algorithmic learning theory
cumulative regret,simple regret,regret notion,online exploration,available round,exploitation need,main result,performance criterion,required exploration-exploitation trade-offs,stochastic multi-armed bandit problem,multi-armed bandits problem,pure exploration
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Journal
abs/0802.2
0302-9743
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
3-642-04413-1
6
0.95
References 
Authors
9
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sébastien Bubeck1147292.28
Rémi Munos22240157.06
Gilles Stoltz335131.53