M.S. Final Oral Exam: Timothy Schommer

Event
Speaker: 
Timothy Schommer
Monday, May 9, 2022 - 10:00am
Event Type: 

Streamlining Experimental Testing of Multi-armed Bandit Methods

I completed my Creative Component under Professor Quinn working with a PhD student on developing code to empirically evaluate multi-armed bandit algorithms. Multi-armed bandit problems are a special class of reinforcement learning problems where there are a set of choices at each timestep and a learning agent has to choose a subset of those choices and attempt to maximize their received reward. When I joined the project, the group’s codebase was in poor condition: it had lots of duplicated code, no version control, and a lot of hardcoding of parameters, output file paths, and experimental inputs. I set about working on improving and streamlining the experimental setup, putting it on GitHub and working towards a system that reduced the amount of code duplication and hardcoding and that allowed for the paths of output files to easily be updated to reflect what experimental parameters are currently under test. Of these goals, the updates to the file paths were the most challenging to achieve, because most filesystems and libraries to work with them are not designed around the specific types of updates that needed to be made. I was able to successfully meet each of my design goals and provide the group with a system that should make it significantly easier for them to develop and run new experiments in the future.

Committee: Chris Quinn (major professor) and Samik Basu

Join on Zoom: Please click this URL to start or join. https://iastate.zoom.us/j/96351145958 Or, go to https://iastate.zoom.us/join and enter meeting ID: 963 5114 5958