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MaxGap Bandit: Adaptive Algorithms for Approximate Ranking
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
  • Sumeet Katariya
  • Ardhendu S. Tripathy, Missouri University of Science and Technology
  • Robert Nowak
Abstract

This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate ranking, noisy sorting, outlier detection, and top-arm identification in bandits. The key novelty of the MaxGap bandit problem is that it aims to adaptively determine the natural partitioning of the distributions into a subset with larger means and a subset with smaller means, where the split is determined by the largest gap rather than a pre-specified rank or threshold. Estimating an arm's gap requires sampling its neighboring arms in addition to itself, and this dependence results in a novel hardness parameter that characterizes the sample complexity of the problem. We propose elimination and UCB-style algorithms and show that they are minimax optimal. Our experiments show that the UCB-style algorithms require 6-8x fewer samples than non-adaptive sampling to achieve the same error.

Meeting Name
33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2019 (2019: Dec. 8-14, Vancouver, Canada)
Department(s)
Computer Science
Comments

This work was partially supported by AFOSR/AFRL grants FA8750-17-2-0262 and FA9550-18-1-0166.

Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2019 Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
12-14-2019
Publication Date
14 Dec 2019
Disciplines
Citation Information
Sumeet Katariya, Ardhendu S. Tripathy and Robert Nowak. "MaxGap Bandit: Adaptive Algorithms for Approximate Ranking" Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems Vol. 32 (2019) ISSN: 1049-5258
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ardhendu-s-tripathy/7/