Learning in Restless Multi-Armed Bandits using Adaptive Arm Sequencing Rules

Tomer Gafni, Kobi Cohen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

We consider a class of restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problems with unknown arm dynamics. At each time, a player chooses an arm out of N arms to play, referred to as an active arm, and receives a random reward from a finite set of reward states. The reward state of the active arm transits according to an unknown Markovian dynamic. The reward state of passive arms (which are not chosen to play at time t) evolves according to an arbitrary unknown random process. The objective is an arm-selection policy that minimizes the regret, defined as the reward loss with respect to a player that always plays the most rewarding arm. This class of RMAB problems has been studied recently in the context of communication networks and financial investment applications. We develop a strategy that selects arms to be played in a consecutive manner in which the selection sequencing rules are adaptively updated controlled by the current sample reward means, referred to as Adaptive Sequencing Rules (ASR) algorithm. By designing judiciously the adaptive sequencing rules of the chosen arms, we show that ASR algorithm achieves a logarithmic regret order with time and a finite-sample bound on the regret is established. Although existing methods have shown a logarithmic regret order with time in this RMAB setting, the theoretical analysis presents significant improvement in the regret scaling with respect to the system parameters under ASR. Extensive simulation results support the theoretical study and demonstrate strong performance of the algorithm as compared to existing methods.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2018 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, ISIT 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Pages1206-1210
Number of pages5
ISBN (Print)9781538647806
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Aug 2018
Event2018 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, ISIT 2018 - Vail, United States
Duration: 17 Jun 201822 Jun 2018

Publication series

NameIEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Proceedings
Volume2018-June
ISSN (Print)2157-8095

Conference

Conference2018 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, ISIT 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVail
Period17/06/1822/06/18

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Modeling and Simulation
  • Applied Mathematics

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