Abstract:
The pure-exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits aims to find one or more arms with the largest (or near largest) means. Examples include finding an -good arm, best-arm identification, top- arm identification, and finding all arms with means above a specified threshold. However, the problem of finding \emph{all} -good arms has been overlooked in past work, although arguably this may be the most natural objective in many applications. For example, a virologist may conduct preliminary laboratory experiments on a large candidate set of treatments and move all -good treatments into more expensive clinical trials. Since the ultimate clinical efficacy is uncertain, it is important to identify all -good candidates. Mathematically, the all--good arm identification problem is presents significant new challenges and surprises that do not arise in the pure-exploration objectives studied in the past. We introduce two algorithms to overcome these and demonstrate their great empirical performance on a large-scale crowd-sourced dataset of M ratings collected by the New Yorker Caption Contest as well as a dataset testing hundreds of possible cancer drugs.
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