Guarantees for Efficient and Adaptive Online Learning

In this thesis, we study the problem of adaptive online learning in several different settings. We first study the problem of predicting graph labelings online which are assumed to change over time. We develop the machinery of cluster specialists which probabilistically exploit any cluster structure in the graph. We give a mistake-bounded algorithm that surprisingly requires only O(log n) time per trial for an n-vertex graph, an exponential improvement over existing methods. We then consider the model of non-stationary prediction with expert advice with long-term memory guarantees in the sense of Bousquet and Warmuth, in which we learn a small pool of experts. We consider relative entropy projection-based algorithms, giving a linear-time algorithm that improves on the best known regret bound. We show that such projection updates may be advantageous over previous "weight-sharing" approaches when weight updates come with implicit costs such as in portfolio optimization. We give an algorithm to compute the relative entropy projection onto the simplex with non-uniform (lower) box constraints in linear time, which may be of independent interest. We finally extend the model of long-term memory by introducing a new model of adaptive long-term memory. Here the small pool is assumed to change over time, with the trial sequence being partitioned into epochs and a small pool associated with each epoch. We give an efficient linear-time regret-bounded algorithm for this setting and present results in the setting of contextual bandits