Online Learning with Many Experts

Abstract

We study the problem of prediction with expert advice when the number of experts in question may be extremely large or even infinite. We devise an algorithm that obtains a tight regret bound of $\widetilde{O}(\epsilon T + N + \sqrt{NT})$, where $N$ is the empirical $\epsilon$-covering number of the sequence of loss functions generated by the environment. In addition, we present a hedging procedure that allows us to find the optimal $\epsilon$ in hindsight. Finally, we discuss a few interesting applications of our algorithm. We show how our algorithm is applicable in the approximately low rank experts model of Hazan et al. (2016), and discuss the case of experts with bounded variation, in which there is a surprisingly large gap between the regret bounds obtained in the statistical and online settings.