Bandit strategies in social search: the case of the DARPA red balloon challenge
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document(1).pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.94 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d830ac4ccae1bb7364a4ce314be02ff6
Author(s)
Chen, Haohui
Rahwan, Iyad
Cebrian, Manuel
Date Issued
2016
Journal
EPJ Data Science
Publisher
Springer Nature America, Inc
Citation
Chen, Haohui, Iyad Rahwan, and Manuel Cebrian. "Bandit Strategies in Social Search: The Case of the Darpa Red Balloon Challenge." EPJ Data Science 5 1 (2016).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2016, Chen et al. Collective search for people and information has tremendously benefited from emerging communication technologies that leverage the wisdom of the crowds, and has been increasingly influential in solving time-critical tasks such as the DARPA Network Challenge (DNC, also known as the Red Balloon Challenge). However, while collective search often invests significant resources in encouraging the crowd to contribute new information, the effort invested in verifying this information is comparable, yet often neglected in crowdsourcing models. This paper studies how the exploration-verification trade-off displayed by the teams modulated their success in the DNC, as teams had limited human resources that they had to divide between recruitment (exploration) and verification (exploitation). Our analysis suggests that team performance in the DNC can be modelled as a modified multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, where information arrives to the team originating from sources of different levels of veracity that need to be assessed in real time. We use these insights to build a data-driven agent-based model, based on the DNC’s data, to simulate team performance. The simulation results match the observed teams’ behavior and demonstrate how to achieve the best balance between exploration and exploitation for general time-critical collective search tasks.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1140/EPJDS/S13688-016-0082-4
