*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
TITLE: Information Filtering and arXiv.org: Bandits, Exploration vs. Exploitation, and the Cold Start Problem
SPEAKER: Peter Frazier, Cornell University
ABSTRACT:
We consider information filtering, in which we face a stream of items too voluminous to process by hand (e.g., scientific articles, blog posts, emails), and must rely on a computer system to automatically filter out irrelevant items. Such systems face the exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff, in which it may be beneficial to present an item despite a low probability of relevance, just to learn about future items with similar content. We present a Bayesian sequential decision-making model of this problem, and provide a decomposition technique that allows solving the resulting Markov decision process to optimality. We show that the resulting method is especially useful when facing the cold start problem, i.e., when filtering items for new users without a long history of past interactions. We then present initial results from an ongoing rollout of this information filtering method for an influential repository of scientific articles, arXiv.org.
