Simple (dynamic) bandit algorithms for hyper-parameter tuning

Hyper-parameter tuning is a major part of modern machine learning systems. The tuning itself can be seen as a sequential resource allocation problem. As such, methods for multi-armed bandits have been already applied. In this paper, we view hyper-parameter optimization as an instance of best-arm identification in infinitely many-armed bandits. We propose D-TTTS, a new adaptive algorithm inspired by Thompson sampling, which dynamically balances between refining the estimate of the quality of hyper-parameter configurations previously explored and adding new hyper-parameter configurations to the pool of candidates. The algorithm is easy to implement and shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms for hyper-parameter tuning.