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Restless dependent bandits with fading memory

Abstract

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in the case when the arm samples are dependent over time and generated from so-called weak \cC\cC-mixing processes. We establish a \cC\cC-Mix Improved UCB agorithm and provide both problem-dependent and independent regret analysis in two different scenarios. In the first, so-called fast-mixing scenario, we show that pseudo-regret enjoys the same upper bound (up to a factor) as for i.i.d. observations; whereas in the second, slow mixing scenario, we discover a surprising effect, that the regret upper bound is similar to the independent case, with an incremental {\em additive} term which does not depend on the number of arms. The analysis of slow mixing scenario is supported with a minmax lower bound, which (up to a log(T)\log(T) factor) matches the obtained upper bound.

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