{"359181":{"#nid":"359181","#data":{"type":"event","title":"Faculty Candidate Seminar","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ETITLE:\u0026nbsp; Learning to optimize via efficient experimentation\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ESPEAKER:\u0026nbsp; Daniel Russo\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EABSTRACT:\u003C\/p\u003EThe information revolution is spawning systems that require very frequent decisions and provide high volumes of data concerning past outcomes. Fueling the design of algorithms used in such systems is a vibrant research area at the intersection of sequential decision-making and machine learning that addresses how to balance between exploration and exploitation and learn over time to make increasingly effective decisions.\u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;In this talk, I will formulate a broad family of such problems that greatly extends the classical multi-armed bandit problem by allowing samples of one action to inform the decision-maker\u0027s assessment of other actions. I\u0027ll describe the rising importance of this problem class, and then discuss two recent methodological advances. One advance is Thompson sampling, a simple and tractable approach that is provably efficient for many relevant problem classes. The other is information-directed sampling, a new algorithm we propose that is inspired by an information-theoretic perspective and can offer greatly superior statistical efficiently. We provide new insight into both algorithms and establish general theoretical guarantees.\u0026nbsp;","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":"","field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Faculty Candidate Seminar"}],"uid":"27187","created_gmt":"2014-12-29 11:25:41","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 02:10:51","author":"Anita Race","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2015-01-05T10:00:00-05:00","event_time_end":"2015-01-05T11:00:00-05:00","event_time_end_last":"2015-01-05T11:00:00-05:00","gmt_time_start":"2015-01-05 15:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2015-01-05 16:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2015-01-05 16:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"1242","name":"School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISYE)"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[{"id":"1795","name":"Seminar\/Lecture\/Colloquium"}],"invited_audience":[{"id":"78761","name":"Faculty\/Staff"}],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}