Related papers: Learning Optimal Interventions
'Evolutionary rescue' is the potential for evolution to enable population persistence in a changing environment. Even with eventual rescue, evolutionary time lags can cause the population size to temporarily fall below a threshold…
This paper studies the problem of performing a sequence of optimal interventions in a causal dynamical system where both the target variable of interest and the inputs evolve over time. This problem arises in a variety of domains e.g.…
Transforming a causal system from a given initial state to a desired target state is an important task permeating multiple fields including control theory, biology, and materials science. In causal models, such transformations can be…
The exploration-exploitation trade-off is among the central challenges of reinforcement learning. The optimal Bayesian solution is intractable in general. This paper studies to what extent analytic statements about optimal learning are…
The treatment allocation mechanism in a randomized clinical trial can be optimized by maximizing the nonparametric efficiency bound for a specific measure of treatment effect. Optimal treatment allocations which may or may not depend on…
Humans rely more and more on systems with AI components. The AI community typically treats human inputs as a given and optimizes AI models only. This thinking is one-sided and it neglects the fact that humans can learn, too. In this work,…
It is known that from purely observational data, a causal DAG is identifiable only up to its Markov equivalence class, and for many ground truth DAGs, the direction of a large portion of the edges will be remained unidentified. The golden…
We discuss a general technique that can be used to form a differentiable bound on the optima of non-differentiable or discrete objective functions. We form a unified description of these methods and consider under which circumstances the…
Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…
In this paper, we study uni-parametric linear optimization problems, in which simultaneously the right-hand-side and the left-hand-side of constraints are linearly perturbed with identical parameter. In addition to the concept of change…
Recently, a new class of non-convex optimization problems motivated by the statistical problem of learning an acyclic directed graphical model from data has attracted significant interest. While existing work uses standard first-order…
The best algorithm for a computational problem generally depends on the "relevant inputs," a concept that depends on the application domain and often defies formal articulation. While there is a large literature on empirical approaches to…
This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…
We consider a social planner faced with a stream of myopic selfish agents. The goal of the social planner is to maximize the social welfare, however, it is limited to using only information asymmetry (regarding previous outcomes) and cannot…
We consider an online regression setting in which individuals adapt to the regression model: arriving individuals are aware of the current model, and invest strategically in modifying their own features so as to improve the predicted score…
We consider adaptive decision-making problems where an agent optimizes a cumulative performance objective by repeatedly choosing among a finite set of options. Compared to the classical prediction-with-expert-advice set-up, we consider…
Most modern learning problems are over-parameterized, where the number of learnable parameters is much greater than the number of training data points. In this over-parameterized regime, the training loss typically has infinitely many…
We discuss non-Euclidean deterministic and stochastic algorithms for optimization problems with strongly and uniformly convex objectives. We provide accuracy bounds for the performance of these algorithms and design methods which are…
This dissertation focuses on modern causal inference under uncertainty and data restrictions, with applications to neoadjuvant clinical trials, distributed data networks, and robust individualized decision making. In the first project, we…
Non-convex optimization problems are challenging to solve; the success and computational expense of a gradient descent algorithm or variant depend heavily on the initialization strategy. Often, either random initialization is used or…