Online Learning With Uncertain Feedback Graphs

Online learning with expert advice is widely used in various machine learning tasks. It considers the problem where a learner chooses one from a set of experts to take advice and make a decision. In many learning problems, experts may be related, henceforth the learner can observe the losses associated with a subset of experts that are related to the chosen one. In this context, the relationship among experts can be captured by a feedback graph, which can be used to assist the learner’s decision-making. However, in practice, the nominal feedback graph often entails uncertainties, which renders it impossible to reveal the actual relationship among experts. To cope with this challenge, the present work studies various cases of potential uncertainties and develops novel online learning algorithms to deal with uncertainties while making use of the uncertain feedback graph. The proposed algorithms are proved to enjoy sublinear regret under mild conditions. Experiments on real datasets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the novel algorithms.