Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better empirical performance compared to the stateof-the-art methods. However, many questions regarding its theoretical performance remained open. In this paper, we design and analyze a generalization of Thompson Sampling algorithm for the stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit problem with linear payoff functions, when the contexts are provided by an adaptive adversary. This is among the most important and widely studied version of the contextual bandits problem. We provide the first theoretical guarantees for the contextual version of Thompson Sampling. We prove a high probability regret bound of Õ(d 3/2 √ T ) (or Õ(d T log(N ))), which is the best regret bound achieved by any computationally efficient algorithm for this problem, and is within a factor of √ d (or log(N )) of the information-theoretic lower bound for this problem.
translated by 谷歌翻译