The problem of detecting an odd arm from a set of K arms of a multi-armed
bandit, with fixed confidence, is studied in a sequential decision-making
scenario. Each arm's signal follows a distribution from a vector exponential
family. All arms have the same parameters except the odd arm. The actual
parameters of the odd and non-odd arms are unknown to the decision maker.
Further, the decision maker incurs a cost for switching from one arm to
another. This is a sequential decision making problem where the decision maker
gets only a limited view of the true state of nature at each stage, but can
control his view by choosing the arm to observe at each stage. Of interest are
policies that satisfy a given constraint on the probability of false detection.
An information-theoretic lower bound on the total cost (expected time for a
reliable decision plus total switching cost) is first identified, and a
variation on a sequential policy based on the generalised likelihood ratio
statistic is then studied. Thanks to the vector exponential family assumption,
the signal processing in this policy at each stage turns out to be very simple,
in that the associated conjugate prior enables easy updates of the posterior
distribution of the model parameters. The policy, with a suitable threshold, is
shown to satisfy the given constraint on the probability of false detection.
Further, the proposed policy is asymptotically optimal in terms of the total
cost among all policies that satisfy the constraint on the probability of false
detection