Cascading Contextual Assortment Bandits

Abstract

We present a new combinatorial bandit model, the \textit{cascading contextual assortment bandit}. This model serves as a generalization of both existing cascading bandits and assortment bandits, broadening their applicability in practice. For this model, we propose our first UCB bandit algorithm, UCB-CCA. We prove that this algorithm achieves a $T$-step regret upper-bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\frac{1}{\kappa}d\sqrt{T})$, sharper than existing bounds for cascading contextual bandits by eliminating dependence on cascade length $K$. To improve the dependence on problem-dependent constant $\kappa$, we introduce our second algorithm, UCB-CCA+, which leverages a new Bernstein-type concentration result. This algorithm achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d\sqrt{T})$ without dependence on $\kappa$ in the leading term. We substantiate our theoretical claims with numerical experiments, demonstrating the practical efficacy of our proposed methods.