A Hierarchy of Twofold Resource Allocation Automata Supporting Optimal Sampling

We consider the problem of allocating limited sampling resources in a "real-time" manner with the purpose of estimating multiple binomial proportions. More specifically, the user is presented with `n ' sets of data points, S 1 , S 2 , ..., S n , where the set S i has N i points drawn from two classes {*** 1 , *** 2 }. A random sample in set S i belongs to *** 1 with probability u i and to *** 2 with probability 1 *** u i , with {u i }. i = 1, 2, ...n , being the quantities to be learnt. The problem is both interesting and non-trivial because while both n and each N i are large, the number of samples that can be drawn is bounded by a constant, c . We solve the problem by first modelling it as a Stochastic Non-linear Fractional Knapsack Problem . We then present a completely new on-line Learning Automata (LA) system, namely, the Hierarchy of Twofold Resource Allocation Automata (H-TRAA), whose primitive component is a Twofold Resource Allocation Automaton (TRAA), both of which are asymptotically optimal. Furthermore, we demonstrate empirically that the H-TRAA provides orders of magnitude faster convergence compared to the LAKG which represents the state-of-the-art. Finally, in contrast to the LAKG, the H-TRAA scales sub-linearly. Based on these results, we believe that the H-TRAA has also tremendous potential to handle demanding real-world applications.