Related papers: Importance Sampling Policy Evaluation with an Esti…
Off-policy learning methods are intended to learn a policy from logged data, which includes context, action, and feedback (cost or reward) for each sample point. In this work, we build on the counterfactual risk minimization framework,…
Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…
Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…
We consider a personalized pricing problem in which we have data consisting of feature information, historical pricing decisions, and binary realized demand. The goal is to perform off-policy evaluation for a new personalized pricing policy…
This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will obtain in an…
We develop a generic data-driven method for estimator selection in off-policy policy evaluation settings. We establish a strong performance guarantee for the method, showing that it is competitive with the oracle estimator, up to a constant…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several…
Offline policy learning aims to use historical data to learn an optimal personalized decision rule. In the standard estimate-then-optimize framework, reweighting-based methods (e.g., inverse propensity weighting or doubly robust estimators)…
Off-policy evaluation provides an essential tool for evaluating the effects of different policies or treatments using only observed data. When applied to high-stakes scenarios such as medical diagnosis or financial decision-making, it is…
Off-policy evaluation learns a target policy's value with a historical dataset generated by a different behavior policy. In addition to a point estimate, many applications would benefit significantly from having a confidence interval (CI)…
The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…
Randomized trials, also known as A/B tests, are used to select between two policies: a control and a treatment. Given a corresponding set of features, we can ideally learn an optimized policy P that maps the A/B test data features to action…
Importance sampling is a variance reduction technique for efficient estimation of rare-event probabilities by Monte Carlo. In standard importance sampling schemes, the system is simulated using an a priori fixed change of measure suggested…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are typically sample-inefficient, making it challenging to train and deploy RL-policies in real world robots. Even a robust policy trained in simulation requires a real-world deployment to assess their…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…
We study the efficient off-policy evaluation of natural stochastic policies, which are defined in terms of deviations from the behavior policy. This is a departure from the literature on off-policy evaluation where most work consider the…
The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…
Assessing the effects of a policy based on observational data from a different policy is a common problem across several high-stake decision-making domains, and several off-policy evaluation (OPE) techniques have been proposed. However,…
A critical need for industrial recommender systems is the ability to evaluate recommendation policies offline, before deploying them to production. Unfortunately, widely used off-policy evaluation methods either make strong assumptions…