Peter Stone's Selected Publications

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Efficient Selection of Multiple Bandit Arms: Theory and Practice

Efficient Selection of Multiple Bandit Arms: Theory and Practice.
Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan and Peter Stone.
In Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2010.

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Abstract

We consider the general, widely applicable problem of selecting from $n$ real-valued random variables a subset of size $m$ of those with the highest means, based on as few samples as possible. This problem, which we denote \textscExplore-$m$, is a core aspect in several stochastic optimization algorithms, and applications of simulation and industrial engineering. The theoretical basis for our work is an extension of a previous formulation using multi-armed bandits that is devoted to identifying just the one best of $n$ random variables (\textscExplore-$1$). In addition to providing PAC bounds for the general case, we tailor our theoretically grounded approach to work efficiently in practice. Empirical comparisons of the resulting sampling algorithm against state-of-the-art subset selection strategies demonstrate significant gains in sample efficiency.

BibTeX Entry

@InProceedings{ICML10-kalyanakrishnan,
	author = "Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan and Peter Stone",
	title = "Efficient Selection of Multiple Bandit Arms: Theory and Practice",
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)",
	year = "2010",
	abstract = {
		We consider the general, widely applicable problem of selecting
		from $n$ real-valued random variables a subset of size $m$ of those with
		the highest means, based on as few samples as possible. This problem,
		which we denote \textsc{Explore}-$m$, is a core aspect in several
		stochastic optimization algorithms, and applications of simulation and
		industrial engineering. The theoretical basis for our work is an
		extension of a previous formulation using multi-armed bandits that is
		devoted to identifying just the one best of $n$ random variables
		(\textsc{Explore}-$1$). In addition to providing PAC bounds for the
		general case, we tailor our theoretically grounded approach to work
		efficiently in practice. Empirical comparisons of the resulting sampling
		algorithm against state-of-the-art subset selection strategies
		demonstrate significant gains in sample efficiency.
	},
}

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