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arXiv · 2104.08615

Conservative Contextual Combinatorial Cascading Bandit

Kun Wang·Canzhe Zhao·Shuai Li·Shuo Shao
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Abstract

Conservative mechanism is a desirable property in decision-making problems which balance the tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation. We propose the novel \emph{conservative contextual combinatorial cascading bandit ($C^4$-bandit)}, a cascading online learning game which incorporates the conservative mechanism. At each time step, the learning agent is given some contexts and has to recommend a list of items but not worse than the base strategy and then observes the reward by some stopping rules. We design the $C^4$-UCB algorithm to solve the problem and prove its n-step upper regret bound for two situations: known baseline reward and unknown baseline reward. The regret in both situations can be decomposed into two terms: (a) the upper bound for the general contextual combinatorial cascading bandit; and (b) a constant term for the regret from the conservative mechanism. We also improve the bound of the conservative contextual combinatorial bandit as a by-product. Experiments on synthetic data demonstrate its advantages and validate our theoretical analysis.

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Kun Wang, Canzhe Zhao, Shuai Li, Shuo Shao. 2021-04-17. Conservative Contextual Combinatorial Cascading Bandit. https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08615

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