Weak Signal Asymptotics for Sequentially Randomized Experiments

Abstract: We use the lens of weak signal asymptotics to study a class of sequentially randomized experiments, including those that arise in solving multi-armed bandit problems. In an experiment with $n$ time steps, we let the mean reward gaps between actions scale to the order $1/\sqrt{n}$ so as to preserve the difficulty of the learning task as $n$ grows. In this regime, we show that the sample paths of a class of sequentially randomized experiments -- adapted to this scaling regime and with arm selection probabilities that vary continuously with state -- converge weakly to a diffusion limit, given as the solution to a stochastic differential equation. The diffusion limit enables us to derive refined, instance-specific characterization of stochastic dynamics, and to obtain several insights on the regret and belief evolution of a number of sequential experiments including Thompson sampling (but not UCB, which does not satisfy our continuity assumption). We show that all sequential experiments whose randomization probabilities have a Lipschitz-continuous dependence on the observed data suffer from sub-optimal regret performance when the reward gaps are relatively large. Conversely, we find that a version of Thompson sampling with an asymptotically uninformative prior variance achieves near-optimal instance-specific regret scaling, including with large reward gaps, but these good regret properties come at the cost of highly unstable posterior beliefs.