Discrete Choice Multi-Armed Bandits

Abstract

This paper establishes a connection between a category of discrete choice models and the realms of online learning and multiarmed bandit algorithms. Our contributions can be summarized in two key aspects. Firstly, we furnish sublinear regret bounds for a comprehensive family of algorithms, encompassing the Exp3 algorithm as a particular case. Secondly, we introduce a novel family of adversarial multiarmed bandit algorithms, drawing inspiration from the generalized nested logit models initially introduced by \citet{wen:2001}. These algorithms offer users the flexibility to fine-tune the model extensively, as they can be implemented efficiently due to their closed-form sampling distribution probabilities. To demonstrate the practical implementation of our algorithms, we present numerical experiments, focusing on the stochastic bandit case.