Parallel Online Clustering of Bandits via Hedonic Game
Authors: Xiaotong Cheng, Cheng Pan, Setareh Maghsudi

Contextual bandit algorithms appear in several applications, such as online advertisement and recommendation systems like personalized education or personalized medicine. Individually-tailored recommendations boost the performance of the underlying application; nevertheless, providing individual suggestions becomes costly and even implausible as the number of users grows. As such, to efficiently serve the demands of several users in modern applications, it is imperative to identify the underlying users’ clusters, i.e., the groups of users for which a single recommendation might be (near-)optimal. We propose CLUB-HG, a novel algorithm that integrates a game-theoretic approach into clustering inference. Our algorithm achieves Nash equilibrium at each inference step and discovers the underlying clusters. We also provide regret analysis within a standard linear stochastic noise setting. Finally, experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the superior performance of our proposed algorithm compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.