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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
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Algorithms & Randomness Center (ARC)
Shipra Agrawal (Columbia)
Monday, September 23, 2019
Groseclose 402 - 11:00 am
Title: Thompson Sampling for learning in online decision making
Abstract: Modern online marketplaces feed themselves. They rely on historical data to optimize content and user-interactions, but further, the data generated from these interactions is fed back into the system and used to optimize future interactions. As this cycle continues, good performance requires algorithms capable of learning actively through sequential interactions, systematically experimenting to improve future performance, and balancing this experimentation with the desire to make decisions with most immediate benefit. Thompson Sampling is a surprisingly simple and flexible Bayesian heuristic for handling this exploration-exploitation tradeoff in online decision problems. While this basic algorithmic technique can be traced back to 1933, the last five years have seen an unprecedented growth in the theoretical understanding as well as commercial interest in this method. In this talk, I will discuss our work in design and analysis of Thompson Sampling based algorithms for several classes of multi-armed bandits, online assortment selection, and reinforcement learning learning problems. We demonstrate that natural versions of the Thompson Sampling heuristic achieve near-optimal theoretical performance bounds for these problems, along with attractive empirical performance.
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Videos of recent talks are available at: https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/46836
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