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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Prospects for bandit solutions in sensor management
AU - Pavlidis, N
AU - Adams, N M
AU - Nicholson, M
AU - Hand, D J
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Sensor management in information-rich and dynamic environments can be posed as a sequential action selection problem with side information. To study such problems we employ the dynamic multi-armed bandit with covariates framework. In this generalization of the multi-armed bandit, the expected rewards are time-varying linear functions of the covariate vector. The learning goal is to associate the covariate with the optimal action at each instance, essentially learning to partition the covariate space adaptively. Applications of sensor management are frequently in environments in which the precise nature of the dynamics is unknown. In such settings, the sensor manager tracks the evolving environment by observing only the covariates and the consequences of the selected actions. This creates difficulties not encountered in static problems, and changes the exploitation–exploration dilemma. We study the relationship between the different factors of the problem and provide interesting insights. The impact of the environment dynamics on the action selection problem is influenced by the covariate dimensionality. We present the surprising result that strategies that perform very little or no exploration perform surprisingly well in dynamic environments
AB - Sensor management in information-rich and dynamic environments can be posed as a sequential action selection problem with side information. To study such problems we employ the dynamic multi-armed bandit with covariates framework. In this generalization of the multi-armed bandit, the expected rewards are time-varying linear functions of the covariate vector. The learning goal is to associate the covariate with the optimal action at each instance, essentially learning to partition the covariate space adaptively. Applications of sensor management are frequently in environments in which the precise nature of the dynamics is unknown. In such settings, the sensor manager tracks the evolving environment by observing only the covariates and the consequences of the selected actions. This creates difficulties not encountered in static problems, and changes the exploitation–exploration dilemma. We study the relationship between the different factors of the problem and provide interesting insights. The impact of the environment dynamics on the action selection problem is influenced by the covariate dimensionality. We present the surprising result that strategies that perform very little or no exploration perform surprisingly well in dynamic environments
U2 - 10.1093/comjnl/bxp122
DO - 10.1093/comjnl/bxp122
M3 - Journal article
VL - 53
SP - 1370
EP - 1383
JO - The Computer Journal
JF - The Computer Journal
SN - 0010-4620
IS - 9
ER -