Nonlinear Randomized Urn Models: a Stochastic Approximation Viewpoint
This work extends the link between stochastic approximation (SA) theory and randomized urn models, and their applications to clinical trials. We no longer assume that the drawing rule is uniform among the balls of the urn (which contains d colors), but can be reinforced by a function f which models risk aversion. Firstly, by considering that f is concave or convex and by reformulating the dynamics of the urn composition as an SA algorithm with emainder, we derive the a.s.