High-Dimensional Sparse Linear Bandits

Stochastic linear bandits with high-dimensional sparse features are a practical model for a variety of domains, including personalized medicine and online advertising [Bastani and Bayati, 2020] . We derive a novel Ω(n 2/3 ) dimension-free minimax regret lower bound for sparse linear bandits in the data-poor regime where the horizon is smaller than the ambient dimension and where the feature vectors admit a well-conditioned exploration distribution. This is complemented by a nearly matching upper bound for an explore-then-commit algorithm showing that that Θ(n 2/3 ) is the optimal rate in the data-poor regime. The results complement existing bounds for the data-rich regime and provide another example where carefully balancing the trade-off between information and regret is necessary. Finally, we prove a dimension-free O( √ n) regret upper bound under an additional assumption on the magnitude of the signal for relevant features. 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020),