Global optimization in Bayesian inference yields little additional benefit.
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Myopic procedures are shown to be asymptotically optimal in ranking and selection problems.
Efficiently optimizes constrained problems with two-step lookahead BO.
Paper confirms Feldman's conjecture on two-armed bandit problem.
Myopic optimization outperforms reinforcement learning in portfolio management, leading to lower returns and higher risks.
This paper optimizes sampling policies for Bayesian optimization to improve exploration and exploitation.
Myopic investors make suboptimal choices that benefit others, leading to market inefficiencies.
Lookahead, also known as non-myopic, Bayesian optimization (BO) aims to find optimal sampling policies through solving a dynamic program (DP) that maximizes a long-term reward over a rolling horizon. Though promising, lookahead BO faces the risk of error propagation through its increased dependence on a possibly mis-sp…
Portfolio turnpikes state that, as the investment horizon increases, optimal portfolios for generic utilities converge to those of isoelastic utilities. This paper proves three kinds of turnpikes. In a general semimartingale setting, the abstract turnpike states that optimal final payoffs and portfolios converge under …
New RL algorithms find SNE in Markov games with myopic followers.
We maximize the expected utility from terminal wealth for an HARA investor when the market price of risk is an unobservable random variable. We compute the optimal portfolio explicitly and explore the effects of learning by comparing it with the corresponding myopic policy. In particular, we show that, for a market pri…
The paper calculates how fast optimal investment strategies approach CRRA strategies in stochastic factor models.
New -step policy gradient method avoids local optima in restricted policy classes.
This paper derives a portfolio decomposition formula when the agent maximizes utility of her wealth at some finite planning horizon. The financial market is complete and consists of multiple risky assets (stocks) plus a risk free asset. The stocks are modelled as exponential Brownian motions with drift and volatility b…
New method optimizes costly functions with unknown costs and budget constraints.
NM-PPG optimizes adaptive feature acquisition in POMDPs for better predictions.
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a class of sample-efficient global optimization methods, where a probabilistic model conditioned on previous observations is used to determine future evaluations via the optimization of an acquisition function. Most acquisition functions are myopic, meaning that they only consider the impa…
Finite-horizon sequential experimental design (SED) arises naturally in many contexts, including hyperparameter tuning in machine learning among more traditional settings. Computing the optimal policy for such problems requires solving Bellman equations, which are generally intractable. Most existing work resorts to se…
This paper studies the properties of discrete time stochastic optimal control problems associated with portfolio selection. We investigate if optimal continuous time strategies can be used effectively for a discrete time market after a straightforward discretization. We found that Merton's strategy approximates the per…
We consider two active binary-classification problems with atypical objectives. In the first, active search, our goal is to actively uncover as many members of a given class as possible. In the second, active surveying, our goal is to actively query points to ultimately predict the proportion of a given class. Numerous…
PFNs4BO uses neural processes for flexible Bayesian Optimization.
Efficiently recovers network community structure from clients' small subgraphs.
A new Bayesian method optimizes time-dependent expensive functions with lookahead.
This paper shows how diverse tasks can make inefficient exploration in MTRL efficient.
We design a new myopic strategy for a wide class of sequential design of experiment (DOE) problems, where the goal is to collect data in order to to fulfil a certain problem specific goal. Our approach, Myopic Posterior Sampling (MPS), is inspired by the classical posterior (Thompson) sampling algorithm for multi-armed…
Study optimal portfolio strategy with sporadic bankruptcy for isoelastic utility.
New algorithms optimize time series classification speed and accuracy.
Study on predictable forward processes in trading without frequent evaluations.
We provide a new characterization of mean-variance hedging strategies in a general semimartingale market. The key point is the introduction of a new probability measure which turns the dynamic asset allocation problem into a myopic one. The minimal martingale measure relative to coincides with t…
Algorithm learns optimal coordination for strategic agents in uncertain settings.
New algorithm learns optimal policies in strategic MDPs with private types.
We determine the optimal amount to invest in a Black-Scholes financial market for an individual who consumes at a rate equal to a constant proportion of her wealth and who wishes to minimize the expected time that her wealth spends in drawdown during her lifetime. Drawdown occurs when wealth is less than some fixed pro…
Develops Heuristic Portfolio Optimization (HPO) as an information-restricted projection of Markowitz/tangency solution
Optimization is becoming increasingly common in scientific and engineering domains. Oftentimes, these problems involve various levels of stochasticity or uncertainty in generating proposed solutions. Therefore, optimization in these scenarios must consider this stochasticity to properly guide the design of future exper…
We present GLASSES: Global optimisation with Look-Ahead through Stochastic Simulation and Expected-loss Search. The majority of global optimisation approaches in use are myopic, in only considering the impact of the next function value; the non-myopic approaches that do exist are able to consider only a handful of futu…
Empirical study shows carriers ignore past shippers' behavior, focusing only on current actions.
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are known. However, very few papers adopt a learning perspective, where the parameters…
We consider the problem of learning the functions computing children from parents in a Structural Causal Model once the underlying causal graph has been identified. This is in some sense the second step after causal discovery. Taking a probabilistic approach to estimating these functions, we derive a natural myopic act…
Decision tree algorithms have been among the most popular algorithms for interpretable (transparent) machine learning since the early 1980's. The problem that has plagued decision tree algorithms since their inception is their lack of optimality, or lack of guarantees of closeness to optimality: decision tree algorithm…
We propose a general-purpose approach to discovering active learning (AL) strategies from data. These strategies are transferable from one domain to another and can be used in conjunction with many machine learning models. To this end, we formalize the annotation process as a Markov decision process, design universal s…
The computational costs of inference and planning have confined Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning to one of two dismal fates: powerful Bayes-adaptive planning but only for simplistic models, or powerful, Bayesian non-parametric models but using simple, myopic planning strategies such as Thompson sampling. We …
Efficiently optimizes expensive functions with multi-step lookahead using one-shot optimization.
Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior is an approximately optimal solution to an unknown decision problem. These tech…
Bayesian methods improve drug discovery experiment design.
We present a new algorithm, truncated variance reduction (TruVaR), that treats Bayesian optimization (BO) and level-set estimation (LSE) with Gaussian processes in a unified fashion. The algorithm greedily shrinks a sum of truncated variances within a set of potential maximizers (BO) or unclassified points (LSE), which…
Proposes qPO, a new acquisition strategy for batched Bayesian optimization that maximizes the probability of including the optimum.
We consider the problem faced by a service platform that needs to match limited supply with demand but also to learn the attributes of new users in order to match them better in the future. We introduce a benchmark model with heterogeneous "workers" (demand) and a limited supply of "jobs" that arrive over time. Job typ…
N-discount optimality was introduced as a hierarchical form of policy- and value-function optimality, with Blackwell optimality lying at the top level of the hierarchy Veinott (1969); Blackwell (1962). We formalize notions of myopic discount factors, value functions and policies in terms of Blackwell optimality in MDPs…