Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Fixed Confidence Best Arm Identification in the Bayesian Setting

Kyoungseok Jang · Junpei Komiyama · Kazutoshi Yamazaki

[ ]
Fri 13 Dec 11 a.m. PST — 2 p.m. PST

Abstract:

We consider the fixed-confidence best arm identification (FC-BAI) problem in the Bayesian setting. This problem aims to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed confidence level when the bandit model has been sampled from the known prior. Most studies on the FC-BAI problem have been conducted in the frequentist setting, where the bandit model is predetermined before the game starts. We show that the traditional FC-BAI algorithms studied in the frequentist setting, such as track-and-stop and top-two algorithms, result in arbitrarily suboptimal performances in the Bayesian setting. We also obtain a lower bound of the expected number of samples in the Bayesian setting and introduce a variant of successive elimination that has a matching performance with the lower bound up to a logarithmic factor. Simulations verify the theoretical results.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content