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Comment by e-dard | Hacker News Reader

In a nutshell, the problem is that as you add more arms (e.g., landing page variations) the amount of page views you need (i.e., actions tested), in order to learn reasonably accurate reward distributions, grows significantly.

Further, there are some other challenging aspects to this. 1) The environment -- visitors' preferences over time, your competitors' pages -- is very dynamic; 2) because you have to test and learn in the real world, your actions may impact your future performance.

I used and designed these types of algorithms for my PhD research, but applied them to trader selection between market exchanges; my thesis is in my sig if anyone is interested.

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Very true, but these are rather trivial concerns compared to A/B testing. With A/B testing you still need a large amount of samples, but you also need to specify the (usually arbitrary) parameters, and decide when to stop the test on top of that.

The challenging aspects seem more of a limitation, but you still would be testing things all the time, ostensibly, rather than test once in the beginning and then stay there. I'd imagine some of the algorithms have a window of data to consider, rather than everything since the beginning.

You could also discard old data to make sure past actions don't impact your performance now.

Overall, the technique isn't a miracle cure, of course, but it's leaps and bounds better than the split tests we have now.

I would imagine that in practice you can do things like incrementally fold in new alternatives and expire out old ones as the algorithms evaluate them and still get nearly optimal performance, even if the theory screams bloody murder about it. The theory is screaming about the pathological cases, but I suspect that for things like "the optimal product special to display" you're not looking at something that is in practice all that pathological.

I have been thinking for a while now about the applications of bandits to financial markets (not so much the Q- and TD- learning approaches as I am a bit less familiar with them). I will definitely have a detailed look at the thesis, sounds very interesting!

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