# K-Armed Bandits

How to Learn from Evaluative Feedback in a Nonassociative Setting

K-armed bandits are a foundational method for solving problems based on evaluative instead of instructive feedback as used in supervised learning. The intention of this blog post is to introduce reinforcement learning in a simplified nonassociative setting in form of a $k$-armed bandit problem before we analyze associative settings, e.g. when the best action depends on a specific situation, as required for solving the ‘learning to rank problem’ introduced in Personalize Learning to Rank Results through Reinforcement Learning 😄

Nonetheless, many problems can be formulated within the multi-armed bandit framework, which makes it a useful tool in a machine learning toolbox.

## The $k$-Armed Bandit Problem

Assume you are in a situation where you have to choose amongst k different options repeatedly. The set of options is also called set of actions. Each action is associated with a numerical reward from a stationary probability distribution. The primary goal is to maximize the expected total reward for some time period.

The problem formulation is the original form of the $k$-armed bandit problem, where the term and the problem resembles playing at a slot machine or one-armed bandit with $k = 1$. For $k = n$ each action selection corresponds to play one of the machine’s $n$ levers, where the rewards are the payoffs for hitting the jackpot. Another area of application would be a homogeneous group of shop visitors where a sales person tries to make the right offer from $k$ offers, with the reward being, that a shop visitor accepts and buys the offer. Here, we are already able to see the versatility of $k$-armed bandits, given a nonassociative setting with stationary reward distributions.

The value of an action is the expected or mean reward, given that the action is selected. Typically, the selected action at timestep $t$ is denoted as $A_t$ and the corresponding reward as $R_t$, subsequently the value of an arbitrary action $a$, denoted as $q_{*}(a)$, is the expected reward given the circumstance $a$ is selected:

$$q_{*}(a) = \mathbb{E}[R_t | A_t = a]$$

Because we do not know the value $q_{*}(a)$ of each possible action with certainty, we need to maintain value estimates Q_t(a) with the goal to be close to $q_{*}(a)$.

Because we do not know the value $q_{*}(a)$ of each possible action with certainty, we need to maintain value estimates Q_t(a) with the goal to be close to $q_{*}(a)$.

At each timestep $t$ there is at least one action with the greatest value amongst the maintained action value estimations. Those action are called $greedy$ actions. Selecting greedy actions corresponds to the exploitation of your current knowledge, wheras selecting a non-greedy action corresponds to the exploration of your knowledge by improving non-greedy action value estimates. If the goal is to maximize the reward at the current time step, choosing a greedy action is the right choice. Typically, however, this is a myopic approach to action selection, as exploration may lead to the discovery of actions with higher rewards by improving the action value estimations of non-greedy actions.

##### Henrik Hain
###### Senior Data Scientist / Data Engineer

My (research) interests evolve around the practical and theoretical aspects of software engineering, (self-) learning systems and algorithms, especially (deep) reinforcement learning, spatio-temporal event detection, and computer vision approaches.