Related papers: Doubly robust off-policy evaluation with shrinkage
We consider the actor-critic contextual bandit for the mobile health (mHealth) intervention. State-of-the-art decision-making algorithms generally ignore the outliers in the dataset. In this paper, we propose a novel robust contextual…
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…
Contextual multi-armed bandit algorithms are widely used in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health. Most of the existing algorithms have regret proportional…
The consistency of doubly robust estimators relies on consistent estimation of at least one of two nuisance regression parameters. In moderate to large dimensions, the use of flexible data-adaptive regression estimators may aid in achieving…
Studies in environmental and epidemiological sciences are often spatially varying and observational in nature with the aim of establishing cause and effect relationships. One of the major challenges with such studies is the presence of…
We address a generalization of the bandit with knapsacks problem, where a learner aims to maximize rewards while satisfying an arbitrary set of long-term constraints. Our goal is to design best-of-both-worlds algorithms that perform…
Importance sampling is a central idea underlying off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. It provides a strategy for re-weighting samples from a distribution to obtain unbiased estimates under another distribution. However,…
Majority of off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms use overestimation bias control techniques. Most of these techniques rooted in heuristics, primarily addressing the consequences of overestimation rather than its fundamental origins.…
We propose a new weighted average estimator for the high dimensional parameters under the distributed learning system, in which the weight assigned to each coordinate is precisely proportional to the inverse of the variance of the local…
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…
Empirical research typically involves a robustness-efficiency tradeoff. A researcher seeking to estimate a scalar parameter can invoke strong assumptions to motivate a restricted estimator that is precise but may be heavily biased, or they…
Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…
Recommendation strategies are typically evaluated by using previously logged data, employing off-policy evaluation methods to estimate their expected performance. However, for strategies that present users with slates of multiple items, the…
Key challenges in running a retail business include how to select products to present to consumers (the assortment problem), and how to price products (the pricing problem) to maximize revenue or profit. Instead of considering these…
It is well known that machine learning methods can be vulnerable to adversarially-chosen perturbations of their inputs. Despite significant progress in the area, foundational open problems remain. In this paper, we address several key…
This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…
The state-of-the-art methods for estimating high-dimensional covariance matrices all shrink the eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix towards a data-insensitive shrinkage target. The underlying shrinkage transformation is either…
This paper proposes an adaptive penalized weighted mean regression for outlier detection of high-dimensional data. In comparison to existing approaches based on the mean shift model, the proposed estimators demonstrate robustness against…
We study least-squares trace regression when the parameter is the sum of a $r$-low-rank matrix and a $s$-sparse matrix and a fraction $\epsilon$ of the labels is corrupted. For subgaussian distributions and feature-dependent noise, we…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…