Seminar: Fully Sequential Ranking and Selection Procedure with PAC Guarantee
Room 2310, 2/F, Li Dak Sum Yip Chin Academic Building

In the ranking-and-selection field, many current existing fully sequential procedures are developed under the indifference-zone (IZ) formulation which assumes an optimality gap between the best alternative and the others. In this paper, by modifying one classical fully sequential procedure, Paulson’s procedure, we devise a new type of fully sequential procedure which can provide the probably approximately correct (PAC) selection guarantee. The procedure can select an alternative within a certain distance from the best one with the desired probability even when the IZ assumption is violated. To provide this selection guarantee, we lose some efficiency on the procedure. However, we show, both theoretically and numerically, that this efficiency loss is limited and acceptable when the number of alternatives is large.

Event Speaker
Mr. Ying Zhong

Mr Ying Zhong is a 4th-year PhD student in the Department of Management Sciences at City University of Hong Kong. He holds a Master Degree of Applied Statistics from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a Bachelor Degree of Computing Mathematics from City University of Hong Kong. His research interests lie primarily on the ranking-and-selection problem and the multi armed bandit problem.