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Related papers: Confounding-Robust Policy Improvement

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I develop a new identification strategy for treatment effects when noisy measurements of unobserved confounding factors are available. I use proxy variables to construct a random variable conditional on which treatment variables become…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-09-30 Kenichi Nagasawa

Predicting which action (treatment) will lead to a better outcome is a central task in decision support systems. To build a prediction model in real situations, learning from biased observational data is a critical issue due to the lack of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-11 Akira Tanimoto , Tomoya Sakai , Takashi Takenouchi , Hisashi Kashima

Causal inference plays a vital role in diverse domains like epidemiology, healthcare, and economics. De-confounding and counterfactual prediction in observational data has emerged as a prominent concern in causal inference research. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-08 Yonghe Zhao , Qiang Huang , Siwei Wu , Yun Peng , Huiyan Sun

This paper introduces tools for assessing the sensitivity, to unobserved confounding, of a common estimator of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome that employs weights: the weighted linear regression of the outcome on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Leonard Wainstein , Chad Hazlett

This paper addresses the challenge of offline policy learning in reinforcement learning with continuous action spaces when unmeasured confounders are present. While most existing research focuses on policy evaluation within partially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-02 Yuhan Li , Eugene Han , Yifan Hu , Wenzhuo Zhou , Zhengling Qi , Yifan Cui , Ruoqing Zhu

We consider the setting of iterative learning control, or model-based policy learning in the presence of uncertain, time-varying dynamics. In this setting, we propose a new performance metric, planning regret, which replaces the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Naman Agarwal , Elad Hazan , Anirudha Majumdar , Karan Singh

Learning individual-level causal effects from observational data, such as inferring the most effective medication for a specific patient, is a problem of growing importance for policy makers. The most important aspect of inferring causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Christos Louizos , Uri Shalit , Joris Mooij , David Sontag , Richard Zemel , Max Welling

A decision-maker must consider cofounding bias when attempting to apply machine learning prediction, and, while feature selection is widely recognized as important process in data-analysis, it could cause cofounding bias. A causal Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-02 Akihiro Yabe

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Debo Cheng , Jiuyong Li , Lin Liu , Jixue Liu , Kui Yu , Thuc Duy Le

Due to the cost or interference of measurement, we need to control measurement system. Assuming that each variable can be measured sequentially, there exists optimal policy choosing next measurement for the former observations. Though…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Seongwook Yoon , Jaehyun Kim , Heejeong Lim , Sanghoon Sull

Individualized treatment rules can lead to better health outcomes when patients have heterogeneous responses to treatment. Very few individualized treatment rule estimation methods are compatible with a multi-treatment observational study…

Can stated preferences inform counterfactual analyses of actual choice? This research proposes a novel approach to researchers who have access to both stated choices in hypothetical scenarios and actual choices, matched or unmatched. The…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-18 Romuald Meango , Marc Henry , Ismael Mourifie

Statistical learning on biological data can be challenging due to confounding variables in sample collection and processing. Confounders can cause models to generalize poorly and result in inaccurate prediction performance metrics if models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-13 Tzu-Yu Liu , Ajay Kannan , Adam Drake , Marvin Bertin , Nathan Wan

Policy learning utilizing observational data is pivotal across various domains, with the objective of learning the optimal treatment assignment policy while adhering to specific constraints such as fairness, budget, and simplicity. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-12 Pan Zhao , Antoine Chambaz , Julie Josse , Shu Yang

Robustness has been extensively studied in reinforcement learning (RL) to handle various forms of uncertainty such as random perturbations, rare events, and malicious attacks. In this work, we consider one critical type of robustness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Wenhao Ding , Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi , Ding Zhao

Confounding is a significant obstacle to unbiased estimation of causal effects from observational data. For settings with high-dimensional covariates -- such as text data, genomics, or the behavioral social sciences -- researchers have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Katherine A. Keith , Sergey Feldman , David Jurgens , Jonathan Bragg , Rohit Bhattacharya

Recent methodological research in causal inference has focused on effects of stochastic interventions, which assign treatment randomly, often according to subject-specific covariates. In this work, we demonstrate that the usual notion of…

Machine learning practice is often impacted by confounders. Confounding can be particularly severe in remote digital health studies where the participants self-select to enter the study. While many different confounding adjustment…

Applications · Statistics 2019-11-14 Elias Chaibub Neto , Meghasyam Tummalacherla , Lara Mangravite , Larsson Omberg

This paper investigates the challenges of optimal online policy learning under missing data. State-of-the-art algorithms implicitly assume that rewards are always observable. I show that when rewards are missing at random, the Upper…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-29 Filippo Palomba

Estimating the effects of continuous-valued interventions from observational data is a critically important task for climate science, healthcare, and economics. Recent work focuses on designing neural network architectures and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Andrew Jesson , Alyson Douglas , Peter Manshausen , Maëlys Solal , Nicolai Meinshausen , Philip Stier , Yarin Gal , Uri Shalit