Online A-Optimal Design and Active Linear Regression

We consider in this paper the problem of optimal experiment design where a decision maker can choose which points to sample to obtain an estimate β̂ of the hidden parameter β of an underlying linear model. The key challenge of this work lies in the heteroscedasticity assumption that we make, meaning that each covariate has a different and unknown variance. The goal of the decision maker is then to figure out on the fly the optimal way to allocate the total budget of T samples between covariates, as sampling several times a specific one will reduce the variance of the estimated model around it (but at the cost of a possible higher variance elsewhere). By trying to minimize the `2-loss E[‖β̂ − β?‖2] the decision maker is actually minimizing the trace of the covariance matrix of the problem, which corresponds then to online A-optimal design. Combining techniques from bandit and convex optimization we propose a new active sampling algorithm and we compare it with existing ones. We provide theoretical guarantees of this algorithm in different settings, including a O(T−2) regret bound in the case where the covariates form a basis of the feature space, generalizing and improving existing results. Numerical experiments validate our theoretical findings.