Decomposition-Coordination Method for Finite Horizon Bandit Problems

Optimally solving a multi-armed bandit problem suffers the curse of dimensionality. Indeed, resorting to dynamic programming leads to an exponential growth of computing time, as the number of arms and the horizon increase. We introduce a decompositioncoordination heuristic, DeCo, that turns the init...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2024-05
Main Authors: de Lara, Michel, Heymann, Benjamin, Jean-Philippe Chancelier
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Computational efficiency
Computing time
Decomposition
Dynamic programming
Exact solutions
Heuristic
Lower bounds
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Optimally solving a multi-armed bandit problem suffers the curse of dimensionality. Indeed, resorting to dynamic programming leads to an exponential growth of computing time, as the number of arms and the horizon increase. We introduce a decompositioncoordination heuristic, DeCo, that turns the initial problem into parallelly coordinated one-armed bandit problems. As a consequence, we obtain a computing time which is essentially linear in the number of arms. In addition, the decomposition provides a theoretical lower bound on the regret. For the two-armed bandit case, dynamic programming provides the exact solution, which is almost matched by the DeCo heuristic. Moreover, in numerical simulations with up to 100 rounds and 20 arms, DeCo outperforms classic algorithms (Thompson sampling and Kullback-Leibler upper-confidence bound) and almost matches the theoretical lower bound on the regret for 20 arms.
ISSN:2331-8422