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Poster

Non-Stationary Bandits with Auto-Regressive Temporal Dependency

Qinyi Chen · Negin Golrezaei · Djallel Bouneffouf

Great Hall & Hall B1+B2 (level 1) #1808
[ ]
[ Paper [ Poster [ OpenReview
Thu 14 Dec 3 p.m. PST — 5 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) frameworks, predominantly examined under stochastic or adversarial settings, often overlook the temporal dynamics inherent in many real-world applications such as recommendation systems and online advertising. This paper introduces a novel non-stationary MAB framework that captures the temporal structure of these real-world dynamics through an auto-regressive (AR) reward structure. We propose an algorithm that integrates two key mechanisms: (i) an alternation mechanism adept at leveraging temporal dependencies to dynamically balance exploration and exploitation, and (ii) a restarting mechanism designed to discard out-of-date information. Our algorithm achieves a regret upper bound that nearly matches the lower bound, with regret measured against a robust dynamic benchmark. Finally, via a real-world case study on tourism demand prediction, we demonstrate both the efficacy of our algorithm and the broader applicability of our techniques to more complex, rapidly evolving time series.

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