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Functional Sequential Treatment Allocation with Covariates

Machine Learning 2024-12-25 v1 Machine Learning Econometrics Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem with covariates. Given a realization of the covariate vector, instead of targeting the treatment with highest conditional expectation, the decision maker targets the treatment which maximizes a general functional of the conditional potential outcome distribution, e.g., a conditional quantile, trimmed mean, or a socio-economic functional such as an inequality, welfare or poverty measure. We develop expected regret lower bounds for this problem, and construct a near minimax optimal assignment policy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.10996,
  title  = {Functional Sequential Treatment Allocation with Covariates},
  author = {Anders Bredahl Kock and David Preinerstorfer and Bezirgen Veliyev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.10996},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

The material in this paper replaces the material on covariates in [v5] of "Functional Sequential Treatment Allocation"

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:24:20.399Z