Related papers: Off-policy Policy Evaluation For Sequential Decisi…

Covariate benchmarking is an important part of sensitivity analysis about omitted variable bias and can be used to bound the strength of the unobserved confounder using information and judgments about observed covariates. It is common to…

We study the identification and estimation of long-term treatment effects when both experimental and observational data are available. Since the long-term outcome is observed only after a long delay, it is not measured in the experimental…

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in partially observable environments with complex observations, with the goal of developing estimators whose guarantee avoids exponential dependence on the horizon. While such estimators exist for MDPs…

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,…

The assumption of no unmeasured confounders is a critical but unverifiable assumption required for causal inference yet quantitative sensitivity analyses to assess robustness of real-world evidence remains underutilized. The lack of use is…

Causal decomposition analysis aims to assess the effect of modifying risk factors on reducing social disparities in outcomes. Recently, this analysis has incorporated individual characteristics when modifying risk factors by utilizing…

We study the identification and estimation of long-term treatment effects under unobserved confounding by combining an experimental sample, where the long-term outcome is missing, with an observational sample, where the treatment assignment…

Controlled Direct Effect (CDE) is one of the causal estimands used to evaluate both exposure and mediation effects on an outcome. When there are unmeasured confounders existing between the mediator and the outcome, the ordinary…

Inferring the causal effect of a non-randomly assigned exposure on an outcome requires adjusting for common causes of the exposure and outcome to avoid biased conclusions. Notwithstanding the efforts investigators routinely make to measure…

Recommender systems are seen as an effective tool to address information overload, but it is widely known that the presence of various biases makes direct training on large-scale observational data result in sub-optimal prediction…

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms often require careful hyperparameter tuning. Before deployment, we need to select amongst a set of candidate policies. However, there is limited understanding about the fundamental limits of this…

This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning with a focus on behavior policy estimation for importance sampling. Prior work has shown empirically that estimating a history-dependent behavior policy can lead to…

We develop methods for estimating how infinitesimal policy changes affect long-term outcomes in dynamic systems. We show that dynamic marginal policy effects (MPEs) can be identified via tractable reduced-form expressions, and can be…

Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been extensively researched for enhancing human-environment interactions in various human-centric tasks, including e-learning and healthcare. Since deploying and evaluating policies online are high-stakes in…

Identifying causal treatment (or exposure) effects in observational studies requires the data to satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption which is not testable using the observed data. With sensitivity analysis, one can determine how the…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a fundamental task in reinforcement learning (RL). In the classic setting of linear OPE, finite-sample guarantees often take the form $$ \textrm{Evaluation error} \le \textrm{poly}(C^\pi, d,…

Importance sampling (IS) is often used to perform off-policy policy evaluation but is prone to several issues, especially when the behavior policy is unknown and must be estimated from data. Significant differences between the target and…

Several problems in statistics involve the combination of high-variance unbiased estimators with low-variance estimators that are only unbiased under strong assumptions. A notable example is the estimation of causal effects while combining…

NOTE: This preprint has a flawed theoretical formulation. Please avoid it and refer to the ICLR22 publication https://openreview.net/forum?id=q7n2RngwOM. Also, arXiv:2109.15062 contains some new ideas on unobserved Confounding. As an…