2025/05/23 by Liu, Jingyu, Song, Yanglei
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Statistics Theory (math.ST)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.17400
We study the stochastic linear bandit problem with multiple arms over T rounds, where the covariate dimension d may exceed T, but each arm-specific parameter vector is s-sparse. We begin by analyzing the sequential estimation problem in the single-arm setting, focusing on cumulative mean-squared error. We show that Lasso estimators are provably suboptimal in the sequential setting, exhibiting suboptimal dependence on d and T, whereas thresholded Lasso estimators -- obtained by applying least squares to the support selected by thresholding an initial Lasso estimator -- achieve the minimax rate. Building on these insights, we consider the full linear contextual bandit problem and propose a three-stage arm selection algorithm that uses thresholded Lasso as the main estimation method. We derive an upper bound on the cumulative regret of order s(log s)(log d + log T), and establish a matching lower bound up to a log s factor, thereby characterizing the minimax regret rate up to a logarithmic term in s. Moreover, when a short initial period is excluded from the regret, the proposed algorithm achieves exact minimax optimality.