Optimal learning for sequential sampling with non-parametric beliefs

Emre Barut () and Warren Powell ()

Journal of Global Optimization, 2014, vol. 58, issue 3, 517-543

Abstract: We propose a sequential learning policy for ranking and selection problems, where we use a non-parametric procedure for estimating the value of a policy. Our estimation approach aggregates over a set of kernel functions in order to achieve a more consistent estimator. Each element in the kernel estimation set uses a different bandwidth to achieve better aggregation. The final estimate uses a weighting scheme with the inverse mean square errors of the kernel estimators as weights. This weighting scheme is shown to be optimal under independent kernel estimators. For choosing the measurement, we employ the knowledge gradient policy that relies on predictive distributions to calculate the optimal sampling point. Our method allows a setting where the beliefs are expected to be correlated but the correlation structure is unknown beforehand. Moreover, the proposed policy is shown to be asymptotically optimal. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: Bayesian global optimization; Knowledge gradient; Non-parametric estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10898-013-0050-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jglopt:v:58:y:2014:i:3:p:517-543

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... search/journal/10898

DOI: 10.1007/s10898-013-0050-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Global Optimization is currently edited by Sergiy Butenko

More articles in Journal of Global Optimization from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().