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Masters project on using bandit algorithms for optimising CTRs on website content. Also involves some search engine / text mining / dimensionality reduction stuff.

A little bit of messing around with Android SDK too...




You're doing better than 90 percent of everybody else just by expressing this as a bandit problem rather than an AB testing problem.


Hopefully! It is great to work with some real world customer click data...

If anyone is interested in a technical intro to the setting there is a set of slides from John Langford at Yahoo Research (many good and standard reference papers cited in it): http://hunch.net/~exploration_learning/

A/B testing could be thought of as a sort of epsilon-Greedy strategy (particularly if such testing is carried out at regular intervals initially). While not enjoying the optimality characteristics of other algorithms, such an approach can in fact outperform in many practical cases :)




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