Functional Sequential Treatment Allocation with Covariates
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We consider a multi-armed bandit problem with covariates. Given a realization of the covariate vector, instead of targeting the treatment with highest conditional expectation, the decision maker targets the treatment which maximizes a general functional of the conditional potential outcome distribution, e.g., a conditional quantile, trimmed mean, or a socio-economic functional such as an inequality, welfare or poverty measure. We develop expected regret lower bounds for this problem, and construct a near minimax optimal assignment policy.
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