Related papers: The Power and Limits of Predictive Approaches to O…
Creating impact in real-world settings requires artificial intelligence techniques to span the full pipeline from data, to predictive models, to decisions. These components are typically approached separately: a machine learning model is…
Predictions about people, such as their expected educational achievement or their credit risk, can be performative and shape the outcome that they aim to predict. Understanding the causal effect of these predictions on the eventual outcomes…
The predict-then-optimize (PTO) framework is a standard approach in data-driven decision-making, where a decision-maker first estimates an unknown parameter from historical data and then uses this estimate to solve an optimization problem.…
The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…
Many stochastic optimization problems include chance constraints that enforce constraint satisfaction with a specific probability; however, solving an optimization problem with chance constraints assumes that the solver has access to the…
This paper discusses the problem of causal query in observational data with hidden variables, with the aim of seeking the change of an outcome when "manipulating" a variable while given a set of plausible confounding variables which affect…
In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example,…
We address the problem of learning a decision policy from observational data of past decisions in contexts with features and associated outcomes. The past policy maybe unknown and in safety-critical applications, such as medical decision…
Prescriptive process monitoring methods seek to improve the performance of a process by selectively triggering interventions at runtime (e.g., offering a discount to a customer) to increase the probability of a desired case outcome (e.g., a…
When the underlying probability distribution in a stochastic optimization is observed only through data, various data-driven formulations have been studied to obtain approximate optimal solutions. We show that no such formulations can, in a…
We study the following fundamental data-driven pricing problem. How can/should a decision-maker price its product based on data at a single historical price? How valuable is such data? We consider a decision-maker who optimizes over…
We study optimization for data-driven decision-making when we have observations of the uncertain parameters within the optimization model together with concurrent observations of covariates. Given a new covariate observation, the goal is to…
Problem definition: We study a data-driven pricing problem in which a seller sets a price for a single item based on demand observed at a limited number of historical prices. Our goal is to quantify the value of such information and to…
Causal discovery is crucial for understanding complex systems and informing decisions. While observational data can uncover causal relationships under certain assumptions, it often falls short, making active interventions necessary. Current…
A further understanding of cause and effect within observational data is critical across many domains, such as economics, health care, public policy, web mining, online advertising, and marketing campaigns. Although significant advances…
In data-driven optimization, the sample performance of the obtained decision typically incurs an optimistic bias against the true performance, a phenomenon commonly known as the Optimizer's Curse and intimately related to overfitting in…
Prescriptive process monitoring methods seek to optimize the performance of business processes by triggering interventions at runtime, thereby increasing the probability of positive case outcomes. These interventions are triggered according…
We provide a novel characterization of semiparametric efficiency in a generic supervised learning setting where the outcome mean function -- defined as the conditional expectation of the outcome of interest given the other observed…
This paper addresses a novel data science problem, prescriptive price optimization, which derives the optimal price strategy to maximize future profit/revenue on the basis of massive predictive formulas produced by machine learning. The…
Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects is central to data-driven decision-making, yet industrial applications often face a fundamental tension between limited randomized controlled trial (RCT) budgets and abundant but biased…