A Scale Free Algorithm for Stochastic Bandits with Bounded Kurtosis

Abstract

Existing strategies for finite-armed stochastic bandits mostly depend on a parameter of scale that must be known in advance. Sometimes this is in the form of a bound on the payoffs, or the knowledge of a variance or subgaussian parameter. The notable exceptions are the analysis of Gaussian bandits with unknown mean and variance by Cowan and Katehakis [2015] and of uniform distributions with unknown support [Cowan and Katehakis, 2015]. The results derived in these specialised cases are generalised here to the non-parametric setup, where the learner knows only a bound on the kurtosis of the noise, which is a scale free measure of the extremity of outliers.