We analyze the @math -armed bandit problem where the reward for each arm is a noisy realization based on an observed context under mild nonparametric assumptions. We attain tight results for top-arm identification and a sublinear regret of @math , where @math is the context dimension, for a modified UCB algorithm that is simple to implement ( @math NN-UCB). We then give global intrinsic dimension dependent and ambient dimension independent regret bounds. We also discuss recovering topological structures within the context space based on expected bandit performance and provide an extension to infinite-armed contextual bandits. Finally, we experimentally show the improvement of our algorithm over existing multi-armed bandit approaches for both simulated tasks and MNIST image classification.
Many nonparametric regressors were recently shown to converge at rates that depend only on the intrinsic dimension of data. These regressors thus escape the curse of dimension when high-dimensional data has low intrinsic dimension (e.g. a manifold). We show that k-NN regression is also adaptive to intrinsic dimension. In particular our rates are local to a query x and depend only on the way masses of balls centered at x vary with radius. Furthermore, we show a simple way to choose k = k(x) locally at any x so as to nearly achieve the minimax rate at x in terms of the unknown intrinsic dimension in the vicinity of x. We also establish that the minimax rate does not depend on a particular choice of metric space or distribution, but rather that this minimax rate holds for any metric space and doubling measure.