In this paper, we study the trace regression when a matrix of parameters $\mathbf{B}^\star$ is estimated via the convex relaxation of a rank-regularized regression or via regularized non-convex optimization. It is known that these estimators satisfy near-optimal error bounds under assumptions on the rank, coherence, and spikiness of $\mathbf{B}^\star$. We start by introducing a general notion of spikiness for $\mathbf{B}^\star$ that provides a generic recipe to prove the restricted strong convexity of the sampling operator of the trace regression and obtain near-optimal and non-asymptotic error bounds for the estimation error. Similar to the existing literature, these results require the regularization parameter to be above a certain theory-inspired threshold that depends on observation noise that may be unknown in practice. Next, we extend the error bounds to cases where the regularization parameter is chosen via cross-validation. This result is significant in that existing theoretical results on cross-validated estimators (Kale et al., 2011; Kumar et al., 2013; Abou-Moustafa and Szepesvari, 2017) do not apply to our setting since the estimators we study are not known to satisfy their required notion of stability. Finally, using simulations on synthetic and real data, we show that the cross-validated estimator selects a near-optimal penalty parameter and outperforms the theory-inspired approach of selecting the parameter.

Pollution in real time can be incredibly powerful, but is difficult to communicate. Persistent deterioration of land, air, and water are largely invisible to the eye and camera lens. What if water itself could visualize its quality and perform the level of contamination? Ripple Effect is an environmental art installation that reveals water contamination through sonic vibrations and light. Using software technology, water contamination levels are translated into sound waves. The installation consists of speakers that play ‘data sound tracks’, which vibrate water held in attached trays. Participants see and hear the water vibrate based on contaminant concentrations. This paper describes the concept, data-to-sound process, implementation, and participant evaluation surrounding the installation of Ripple Effect in communities neighboring resource extraction and other industrial activity. While there are many existing artworks that visualize environmental quality, Ripple Effect is novel in its use of local water quality data and interactive technology that allows the primary medium, water, to communicate directly with the participant.

We study the structure of regret-minimizing policies in the {\em many-armed} Bayesian multi-armed bandit problem: in particular, with $k$ the number of arms and $T$ the time horizon, we consider the case where $k \geq \sqrt{T}$. We first show that {\em subsampling} is a critical step for designing optimal policies. In particular, the standard UCB algorithm leads to sub-optimal regret bounds in the many-armed regime. However, a subsampled UCB (SS-UCB), which samples $\Theta(\sqrt{T})$ arms and executes UCB only on that subset, is rate-optimal. Despite theoretically optimal regret, even SS-UCB performs poorly due to excessive exploration of suboptimal arms. In particular, in numerical experiments SS-UCB performs worse than a simple greedy algorithm (and its subsampled version) that pulls the current empirical best arm at every time period. We show that these insights hold even in a contextual setting, using real-world data. These empirical results suggest a novel form of {\em free exploration} in the many-armed regime that benefits greedy algorithms. We theoretically study this new source of free exploration and find that it is deeply connected to the distribution of a certain tail event for the prior distribution of arm rewards. This is a fundamentally distinct phenomenon from free exploration as discussed in the recent literature on contextual bandits, where free exploration arises due to variation in contexts. We use this insight to prove that the subsampled greedy algorithm is rate-optimal for Bernoulli bandits when $k > \sqrt{T}$, and achieves sublinear regret with more general distributions. This is a case where theoretical rate optimality does not tell the whole story: when complemented by the empirical observations of our paper, the power of greedy algorithms becomes quite evident. Taken together, from a practical standpoint, our results suggest that in applications it may be preferable to use a variant of the greedy algorithm in the many-armed regime.

We consider the k-armed stochastic contextual bandit problem with d dimensional features, when both k and d can be large. To the best of our knowledge, all existing algorithm for this problem have a regret bound that scale as polynomials of degree at least two in k and d. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce and theoretically analyze a new algorithm (REAL Bandit) with a regret that scales by r^2(k+d) when r is rank of the k by d matrix of unknown parameters. REAL Bandit relies on ideas from low-rank matrix estimation literature and a new row-enhancement subroutine that yields sharper bounds for estimating each row of the parameter matrix that may be of independent interest.