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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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Stijn Vansteelandt

This paper is concerned with constructing a confidence interval for a target policy's value offline based on a pre-collected observational data in infinite horizon settings. Most of the existing works assume no unmeasured variables exist…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-07 Chengchun Shi , Jin Zhu , Ye Shen , Shikai Luo , Hongtu Zhu , Rui Song

We study quantile-optimal policy learning where the goal is to find a policy whose reward distribution has the largest $\alpha$-quantile for some $\alpha \in (0, 1)$. We focus on the offline setting whose generating process involves…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-10 Zhongren Chen , Siyu Chen , Zhengling Qi , Xiaohong Chen , Zhuoran Yang

Unobserved confounders are a long-standing issue in causal inference using propensity score methods. This study proposed nonparametric indices to quantify the impact of unobserved confounders through pseudo-experiments with an application…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-27 Beilin Jia , Donglin Zeng , Qing Yang , Wei Pan

Optimizing survival outcomes, such as patient survival or customer retention, is a critical objective in data-driven decision-making. Off-Policy Evaluation~(OPE) provides a powerful framework for assessing such decision-making policies…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-25 Kohsuke Kubota , Mitsuhiro Takahashi , Yuta Saito

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an observed association without known mechanism must be in want of a causal estimate. However, causal estimation from observational data often relies on the (untestable) assumption of `no…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-12-10 Victor Veitch , Anisha Zaveri

The possibility of unmeasured confounding is one of the main limitations for causal inference from observational studies. There are different methods for (partially) empirically assessing the plausibility of unconfoundedness. However, most…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-28 Fernando Pires Hartwig , Kate Tilling , George Davey Smith

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

Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan

We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-07-23 Mert Demirer , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Greg Lewis , Victor Chernozhukov

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Sungee Hong , Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

Predictive models are often introduced to decision-making tasks under the rationale that they improve performance over an existing decision-making policy. However, it is challenging to compare predictive performance against an existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Luke Guerdan , Amanda Coston , Kenneth Holstein , Zhiwei Steven Wu

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods allow us to compute the expected reward of a policy by using the logged data collected by a different policy. OPE is a viable alternative to running expensive online A/B tests: it can speed up the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Jacek Golebiowski , Philipp Schmidt , Ziawasch Abedjan , Artur Bekasov

We provide an approach to exploratory data analysis in matched observational studies with a single intervention and multiple endpoints. In such settings, the researcher would like to explore evidence for actual treatment effects among these…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-10 Mengqi Lin , Colin Fogarty

Unobserved confounding is a central barrier to drawing causal inferences from observational data. Several authors have recently proposed that this barrier can be overcome in the case where one attempts to infer the effects of several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-20 Alexander D'Amour

This study addresses the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) from dependent samples obtained via the bandit algorithm. The goal of OPE is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained from behavior policies generated by the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-15 Masahiro Kato

Recent work has focused on the potential and pitfalls of causal identification in observational studies with multiple simultaneous treatments. Building on previous work, we show that even if the conditional distribution of unmeasured…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-28 Jiajing Zheng , Alexander D'Amour , Alexander Franks

Policy learning using historical observational data is an important problem that has found widespread applications. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements to send to customers, as well as selecting which medication to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Nian Si , Fan Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou , Jose Blanchet

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim