Contextual bandits with linear payoffs, which are also known as linear
bandits, provide a powerful alternative for solving practical problems of
sequential decisions, e.g., online advertisements. In the era of big data,
contextual data usually tend to be high-dimensional, which leads to new
challenges for traditional linear bandits mostly designed for the setting of
low-dimensional contextual data. Due to the curse of dimensionality, there are
two challenges in most of the current bandit algorithms: the first is high
time-complexity; and the second is extreme large upper regret bounds with
high-dimensional data. In this paper, in order to attack the above two
challenges effectively, we develop an algorithm of Contextual Bandits via
RAndom Projection (\texttt{CBRAP}) in the setting of linear payoffs, which
works especially for high-dimensional contextual data. The proposed
\texttt{CBRAP} algorithm is time-efficient and flexible, because it enables
players to choose an arm in a low-dimensional space, and relaxes the sparsity
assumption of constant number of non-zero components in previous work. Besides,
we provide a linear upper regret bound for the proposed algorithm, which is
associated with reduced dimensions.