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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Greedy Algorithms in Multi-Armed Bandit with Many Arms

We investigate a Bayesian $k$-armed bandit problem in the \emph{many-armed} regime, where $k \geq \sqrt{T}$ and $T$ represents the time horizon. Initially, and aligned with recent literature on many-armed bandit problems, we observe that subsampling plays a key role in designing optimal algorithms; the conventional UCB algorithm is sub-optimal, whereas a subsampled UCB (SS-UCB), which selects $\Theta(\sqrt{T})$ arms for execution under the UCB framework, achieves rate-optimality. However, despite SS-UCB's theoretical promise of optimal regret, it empirically underperforms compared to a greedy algorithm that consistently chooses the empirically best arm. This observation extends to contextual settings through simulations with real-world data. Our findings suggest a new form of \emph{free exploration} beneficial to greedy algorithms in the many-armed context, fundamentally linked to a tail event concerning the prior distribution of arm rewards. This finding diverges from the notion of free exploration, which relates to covariate variation, as recently discussed in contextual bandit literature. Expanding upon these insights, we establish that the subsampled greedy approach not only achieves rate-optimality for Bernoulli bandits within the many-armed regime but also attains sublinear regret across broader distributions. Collectively, our research indicates that in the many-armed regime, practitioners might find greater value in adopting greedy algorithms.

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