Related papers: Policy Evaluation with Latent Confounders via Opti…
Discovering and parameterising latent confounders represent important and challenging problems in causal structure learning and density estimation respectively. In this paper, we focus on both discovering and learning the distribution of…
Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…
This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the presence of unmeasured confounders. Inspired by the two-way fixed effects regression model widely used in the panel data literature, we propose a two-way unmeasured confounding…
We consider learning a causal ordering of variables in a linear non-Gaussian acyclic model called LiNGAM. Several existing methods have been shown to consistently estimate a causal ordering assuming that all the model assumptions are…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…
Addressing selection bias in latent variable causal discovery is important yet underexplored, largely due to a lack of suitable statistical tools: While various tools beyond basic conditional independencies have been developed to handle…
What is the most statistically efficient way to do off-policy evaluation and optimization with batch data from bandit feedback? For log data generated by contextual bandit algorithms, we consider offline estimators for the expected reward…
Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…
We consider Bayesian optimization in settings where observations can be adversarially biased, for example by an uncontrolled hidden confounder. Our first contribution is a reduction of the confounded setting to the dueling bandit model.…
This paper investigates regret minimization, statistical inference, and their interplay in high-dimensional online decision-making based on the sparse linear context bandit model. We integrate the $\varepsilon$-greedy bandit algorithm for…
Marginal structural models are a popular tool for investigating the effects of time-varying treatments, but they require an assumption of no unobserved confounders between the treatment and outcome. With observational data, this assumption…
Contextual Bandits find important use cases in various real-life scenarios such as online advertising, recommendation systems, healthcare, etc. However, most of the algorithms use flat feature vectors to represent context whereas, in the…
Inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in an observational study requires adjusting for observed baseline confounders to avoid bias. However, adjusting for all observed baseline covariates, when only a subset are…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation for slate bandits, for the typical case in which the logging policy factorizes over the slots of the slate. We slightly depart from the existing literature by taking Bayes risk as the criterion…
Estimating causal effects under networked interference from observational data is a crucial yet challenging problem. Most existing methods mainly rely on the networked unconfoundedness assumption, which guarantees the identification of…
Contextual sequential decision problems with categorical or numerical observations are ubiquitous and Generalized Linear Bandits (GLB) offer a solid theoretical framework to address them. In contrast to the case of linear bandits, existing…
We consider model selection in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. Given a set of base learning algorithms, an effective model selection strategy adapts to the best learning algorithm in an online fashion. We show that by…
Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…