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In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that…
Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a general framework to model decision problems where the system dynamics are changing or only partially known. Efficient methods for some \texttt{sa}-rectangular robust MDPs exist, using its…
This paper aims to build a probabilistic framework for Howard's policy iteration algorithm using the language of forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs). As opposed to conventional formulations based on partial…
Despite the importance of this variable in the macroeconomic context, current research on job insecurity remains mainly confined to its non-systemic dimension. The research aim of this paper is to identify the short-run and long-run…
Off-policy evaluation is critical in a number of applications where new policies need to be evaluated offline before online deployment. Most existing methods focus on the expected return, define the target parameter through averaging and…
AI policymakers are responsible for delivering effective governance mechanisms that can provide safe, aligned and trustworthy AI development. However, the information environment offered to policymakers is characterised by an unnecessarily…
Physical reasoning requires forward prediction: the ability to forecast what will happen next given some initial world state. We study the performance of state-of-the-art forward-prediction models in the complex physical-reasoning tasks of…
This paper introduces a formal notion of fixed point explanations, inspired by the "why regress" principle, to assess, through recursive applications, the stability of the interplay between a model and its explainer. Fixed point…
This thesis scrutinizes common assumptions underlying traditional machine learning approaches to fairness in consequential decision making. After challenging the validity of these assumptions in real-world applications, we propose ways to…
The paper investigates data-driven output-feedback predictive control of linear systems subject to stochastic disturbances. The scheme relies on the recursive solution of a suitable data-driven reformulation of a stochastic Optimal Control…
The last several years have brought a growing body of work on ensuring that recommender systems are in some sense consumer-fair -- that is, they provide comparable quality of service, accuracy of representation, and other effects to their…
Decision-theoretic planning with risk-sensitive planning objectives is important for building autonomous agents or decision-support systems for real-world applications. However, this line of research has been largely ignored in the…
Intensified netload uncertainty and variability led to the concept of a new market product, flexible ramping product (FRP). The main goal of FRP is to enhance the generation dispatch flexibility inside real-time (RT) markets to mitigate…
We study the common generalization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with sets of transition probabilities, known as robust MDPs (RMDPs). A standard goal in RMDPs is to compute a policy that maximizes the expected return under an…
A treatment policy defines when and what treatments are applied to affect some outcome of interest. Data-driven decision-making requires the ability to predict what happens if a policy is changed. Existing methods that predict how the…
Counterfactuals are often described as 'retrospective,' focusing on hypothetical alternatives to a realized past. This description relates to an often implicit assumption about the structure and stability of exogenous variables in the…
Consequential decisions are increasingly informed by sophisticated data-driven predictive models. However, to consistently learn accurate predictive models, one needs access to ground truth labels. Unfortunately, in practice, labels may…
This paper studies the identification, estimation, and hypothesis testing problem in complete and incomplete economic models with testable assumptions. Testable assumptions ($A$) give strong and interpretable empirical content to the models…
We provide two methodological insights on \emph{ex ante} policy evaluation for macro models of economic development. First, we show that the problems of parameter instability and lack of behavioral constancy can be overcome by considering…
Roy's `Safety First' criterion for selecting one risky asset from many is adapted to the case of non-normal returns, via Cornish Fisher expansion. The resulting investment objective is consistent with first order stochastic dominance, and…