Skyline Identification in Multi-Armed Bandits

Abstract: We introduce a variant of the classical PAC multi-armed bandit problem. There is an ordered set of $n$ arms $A[1],\dots,A[n]$, each with some stochastic reward drawn from some unknown bounded distribution. The goal is to identify the $skyline$ of the set $A$, consisting of all arms $A[i]$ such that $A[i]$ has larger expected reward than all lower-numbered arms $A[1],\dots,A[i-1]$. We define a natural notion of an $\varepsilon$-approximate skyline and prove matching upper and lower bounds for identifying an $\varepsilon$-skyline. Specifically, we show that in order to identify an $\varepsilon$-skyline from among $n$ arms with probability $1-\delta$, $$ \Theta\bigg(\frac{n}{\varepsilon^2} \cdot \min\bigg{ \log\bigg(\frac{1}{\varepsilon \delta}\bigg), \log\bigg(\frac{n}{\delta}\bigg) \bigg} \bigg) $$ samples are necessary and sufficient. When $\varepsilon \gg 1/n$, our results improve over the naive algorithm, which draws enough samples to approximate the expected reward of every arm; the algorithm of (Auer et al., AISTATS'16) for Pareto-optimal arm identification is likewise superseded. Our results show that the sample complexity of the skyline problem lies strictly in between that of best arm identification (Even-Dar et al., COLT'02) and that of approximating the expected reward of every arm.