Taming The Monster: A Fast And Simple Algorithm For Contextual Bandits

Abstract

We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of K \emphactions in response to the observed \emphcontext, and observes the \emphreward only for that action. Our method assumes access to an oracle for solving fully supervised cost-sensitive classification problems and achieves the statistically optimal regret guarantee with only \otil(\sqrtKT) oracle calls across all T rounds. By doing so, we obtain the most practical contextual bandit learning algorithm amongst approaches that work for general policy classes. We conduct a proof-of-concept experiment which demonstrates the excellent computational and statistical performance of (an online variant of) our algorithm relative to several strong baselines.