# Reducing Exploration of Dying Arms in Mortal Bandits

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.02571 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02571/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Rotting Infinitely Many-armed Bandits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12975/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mortal bandits have proven to be extremely useful for providing news article recommendations, running automated online advertising campaigns, and for other applications where the set of available options changes over time. Previous work on this problem showed how to regulate exploration of new arms when they have recently appeared, but they do not adapt when the arms are about to disappear. Since in most applications we can determine either exactly or approximately when arms will disappear, we can leverage this information to improve performance: we should not be exploring arms that are about to disappear. We provide adaptations of algorithms, regret bounds, and experiments for this study, showing a clear benefit from regulating greed (exploration/exploitation) for arms that will soon disappear. We illustrate numerical performance on the Yahoo! Front Page Today Module User Click Log Dataset.