Related papers: Targeting for long-term outcomes
Retailers have significant potential to improve recommendations through strategic bundling and pricing. By taking into account different types of customers and their purchasing decisions, retailers can better accommodate customer…
There is increasing interest in allocating treatments based on observed individual characteristics: examples include targeted marketing, individualized credit offers, and heterogeneous pricing. Treatment personalization introduces…
We study how an e-commerce firm should make real-time fulfillment decisions in a two-layer distribution network when multi-item customer orders arrive sequentially and future demand is unknown. The central managerial tension is whether to…
Online user-generated content platforms allocate billions of dollars of promotional traffic through algorithms in two-sided marketplaces. To evaluate updates to these algorithms, platforms frequently rely on creator-side randomized…
Offline optimization has recently emerged as an increasingly popular approach to mitigate the prohibitively expensive cost of online experimentation. The key idea is to learn a surrogate of the black-box function that underlines the target…
Algorithm designers typically assume that the input data is correct, and then proceed to find "optimal" or "sub-optimal" solutions using this input data. However this assumption of correct data does not always hold in practice, especially…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) methods learn a policy by iteratively performing multiple mini-batch optimization epochs of a surrogate objective with one set of sampled data. Ratio clipping PPO is a popular variant that clips the…
We propose a data-driven method to establish probabilistic performance guarantees for parametric optimization problems solved via iterative algorithms. Our approach addresses two key challenges: providing convergence guarantees to…
User growth is a major strategy for consumer internet companies. To optimize costly marketing campaigns and maximize user engagement, we propose a novel treatment effect optimization methodology to enhance user growth marketing. By…
This paper studies the problem of optimally allocating treatments in the presence of spillover effects, using information from a (quasi-)experiment. I introduce a method that maximizes the sample analog of average social welfare when…
In program evaluations, units can often anticipate the implementation of a new policy before it occurs. Such anticipatory behavior can lead to units' outcomes becoming dependent on their future treatment assignments. In this paper, I employ…
We investigate how to exploit structural similarities of an individual's potential outcomes (POs) under different treatments to obtain better estimates of conditional average treatment effects in finite samples. Especially when it is…
Evaluating the value of new clinical treatment rules based on patient characteristics is important but often complicated by hidden confounding factors in observational studies. Standard methods for estimating the average patient outcome if…
Policy-makers are often faced with the task of distributing a limited supply of resources. To support decision-making in these settings, statisticians are confronted with two challenges: estimands are defined by allocation strategies that…
We propose a new method in indefinite-horizon settings for estimating optimal dynamic treatment regimes for time-to-event outcomes. This method allows patients to have different numbers of treatment stages and is constructed using…
Affine policies (or control) are widely used as a solution approach in dynamic optimization where computing an optimal adjustable solution is usually intractable. While the worst case performance of affine policies can be significantly bad,…
Problem definition: Access to accurate predictions of patients' outcomes can enhance medical staff's decision-making, which ultimately benefits all stakeholders in the hospitals. A large hospital network in the US has been collaborating…
We consider the optimal value of information (VoI) problem, where the goal is to sequentially select a set of tests with a minimal cost, so that one can efficiently make the best decision based on the observed outcomes. Existing algorithms…
We revisit Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in both on-policy and off-policy optimization regimes. Our motivation comes from recent work on off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which improves training stability, sampling…
There has been a surge of recent interest in automatically learning policies to target treatment decisions based on rich individual covariates. In addition, practitioners want confidence that the learned policy has better performance than…