Related papers: Targeting for long-term outcomes

The paper considers the problem of a leader that seeks to optimally influence the opinions of agents in a directed network through connecting with a limited number of the agents ("direct followers"), possibly in the presence of a fixed…

Predicting which action (treatment) will lead to a better outcome is a central task in decision support systems. To build a prediction model in real situations, learning from biased observational data is a critical issue due to the lack of…

In multi-objective decision planning and learning, much attention is paid to producing optimal solution sets that contain an optimal policy for every possible user preference profile. We argue that the step that follows, i.e, determining…

To address efficiency and design challenges in choice-based matching platforms, we introduce a two-sided assortment optimization framework under general choice preferences. The goal in this problem is to maximize the expected number of…

An important objective in the development of targeted therapies is to identify the populations where the treatment under consideration has positive benefit risk balance. We consider pivotal clinical trials, where the efficacy of a treatment…

With the emergence of precision medicine, estimating optimal individualized decision rules (IDRs) has attracted tremendous attention in many scientific areas. Most existing literature has focused on finding optimal IDRs that can maximize…

Offline model-based optimization (MBO) seeks to discover high-performing designs using only a fixed dataset of past evaluations. Most existing methods rely on learning a surrogate model via regression and implicitly assume that good…

In most medical research, the average treatment effect is used to evaluate a treatment's performance. However, precision medicine requires knowledge of individual treatment effects: What is the difference between a unit's measurement under…

Adaptive experiments, including efficient average treatment effect estimation and multi-armed bandit algorithms, have garnered attention in various applications, such as social experiments, clinical trials, and online advertisement…

In many health policy settings, adaptive interventions target a population of clusters (e.g., schools), with the ultimate intent of impacting outcomes at the level of individuals within the clusters. Health policy researchers can use…

We propose a framework that aligns Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation with profit maximization. Our method recognizes that, for customers with extreme treatment effects, additional estimation accuracy is unlikely to…

The well-known influence maximization problem aims at maximizing the influence of one information cascade in a social network by selecting appropriate seed users prior to the diffusion process. In its adaptive version, additional seed users…

In real-world decision making tasks, it is critical for data-driven reinforcement learning methods to be both stable and sample efficient. On-policy methods typically generate reliable policy improvement throughout training, while…

This paper considers identifying and estimating causal effect parameters in a staggered treatment adoption setting -- that is, where a researcher has access to panel data and treatment timing varies across units. We consider the case where…

We analyse a version of the policy iteration algorithm for the discounted infinite-horizon problem for controlled multidimensional diffusion processes, where both the drift and the diffusion coefficient can be controlled. We prove that,…

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example,…

Surrogate index approaches have recently become a popular method of estimating longer-term impact from shorter-term outcomes. In this paper, we leverage 1098 test arms from 200 A/B tests at Netflix to empirically investigate to what degree…

Understanding the impact of the most effective policies or treatments on a response variable of interest is desirable in many empirical works in economics, statistics and other disciplines. Due to the widespread winner's curse phenomenon,…

Variance reduction for causal inference in the presence of network interference is often achieved through either outcome modeling, typically analyzed under unit-randomized Bernoulli designs, or clustered experimental designs, typically…

Suppose an online platform wants to compare a treatment and control policy, e.g., two different matching algorithms in a ridesharing system, or two different inventory management algorithms in an online retail site. Standard randomized…