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This is yet another comment claiming that Thompson sampling is the answer to all of our statistical problems! Naive Thompson sampling (like the code you linked
by martingoodson 10y ago
This is yet another comment claiming that Thompson sampling is the answer to all of our statistical problems!
Naive Thompson sampling (like the code you linked to) will result in problems equally disastrous to those I wrote about in the Qubit whitepaper. Other comments have highlighted a key problem with simple bandit algorithms - reward distributions which change over time will render their results worthless. You can model these dynamics but not in 'a few lines of very simple code'. It is verging on the irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
I personally favour a bayesian state-space model to elegantly take care of these things - but that's outside the remit of the whitepaper and outside the skill set of most non-statisticians. Frequentist testing, when done properly, is simple to implement and has statistical guarantees that are very attractive in practice.