Seminars & Colloquia Calendar
A Smoothed Analysis of the Greedy Algorithm for the Linear Contextual Bandit Problem
Steven Wu, Microsoft Research, NYC
Location: CoRE 301
Date & time: Wednesday, 18 October 2017 at 11:00AM - 12:00PM
Abstract: Bandit learning models the common setting when the decisions of an algorithm feed back into its training data, and it cannot observe counter-factuals. These settings include criminal recidivism prediction (would an inmate have committed another crime had he been released?), lending (would an applicant denied a loan have paid it back?), and drug trials (how would a patient have responded to a different drug?) The main tension in bandit learning is balancing exploration with exploitation. However, exploration, which explicitly sacrifices welfare today in exchange for potential future benefit, can be distasteful when decisions pertain to individuals. For example, it might be considered unethical to give drug A to a patient while knowing drug B often cures their illness merely to learn about drug A’s efficacy. In other settings (like predictive policing), a lack of exploration has been blamed for perpetuating unfairness. This motivates studying the performance of the greedy algorithm, which only exploits and never explores. Although this is not a no-regret algorithm, we show that when adversarially selected contexts are perturbed by a small amount of Gaussian noise, it recovers strong no-regret bounds.
R. Shapiro Organizer's Page
Chiara Damiolini, Ian Coley and Franco Rota -Charles Weibel Organizer's Page
Narek Hovsepyan and Ewerton Rocha Vieira Organizer's page
Ziming Shi, Sagun Chanillo, Xiaojun Huang, Chi Li, Jian Song Seminar website Old seminar website
Sepehr Assadi Seminar webpage
Jeffry Kahn, Bhargav Narayanan, Jinyoung Park Organizer's webpage
Robert Dougherty-Bliss and Doron Zeilberger --> homepage
Paul Feehan, Daniel Ketover, Natasa Sesum Organizer's webpage
Lev Borisov, Emanuel Diaconescu, Angela Gibney, Nicolas Tarasca, and Chris Woodward Organizer's webpage
Hong Chen Seminar webpage
Fanxin Wu and Nkhalo Malawo Organizer's website
James Holland; Organizer website
Organizers: Maxime Van de Moortel and Avy Soffer. Organizer's Page
Yanyan Li, Zheng-Chao Han, Jian Song, Natasa Sesum Organizer's Webpage
Organizer: Luochen Zhao
Yanyan Li, Zheng-Chao Han, Natasa Sesum, Jian Song Organizer's Page
Lisa Carbone, Yi-Zhi Huang, James Lepowsky, Siddhartha Sahi Organizer's webpage
Simon Thomas website
Kasper Larsen, Daniel Ocone and Kim Weston Organizer's page
Joel Lebowitz, Michael Kiessling
Yanyan Li, Dennis Kriventsov Organizer's Webpage
Alex V. Kontorovich, Vlada Sedláček seminar website
Stephen D. Miller
Organizers: Yanyan Li, Z.C. Han, Jian Song, Natasa Sesum
Kristen Hendricks, Xiaochun Rong, Hongbin Sun, Chenxi Wu Organizer's page
Fioralba Cakoni Seminar webpage
Organizer's webpage: Organizer's webpage
For information on the Statistical Mechanics Conference, visit HERE
- Show events from all categories
Special Note to All Travelers
Directions: map and driving directions. If you need information on public transportation, you may want to check the New Jersey Transit page.
Unfortunately, cancellations do occur from time to time. Feel free to call our department: 848-445-6969 before embarking on your journey. Thank you.