Related papers: State Relevance for Off-Policy Evaluation
Off-Policy evaluation (OPE) is concerned with evaluating a new target policy using offline data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. It is critical in a number of sequential decision making problems ranging from healthcare…
Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…
Estimation of importance sampling weights for off-policy evaluation of contextual bandits often results in imbalance - a mismatch between the desired and the actual distribution of state-action pairs after weighting. In this work we present…
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…
This paper investigates the use of retrospective approximation solution paradigm in solving risk-averse optimization problems effectively via importance sampling (IS). While IS serves as a prominent means for tackling the large sample…
Offline policy evaluation (OPE) is considered a fundamental and challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). This paper focuses on the value estimation of a target policy based on pre-collected data generated from a possibly…
Importance Sampling (IS) is a widely used variance reduction technique for enhancing the efficiency of Monte Carlo methods, particularly in rare-event simulation and related applications. Despite its effectiveness, the performance of IS is…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…
In ordinary importance sampling with a nonnegative integrand there exists an importance sampling strategy with zero variance. Practical sampling strategies are often based on approximating that optimal solution, potentially approaching zero…
Multiple importance sampling (MIS) is an increasingly used methodology where several proposal densities are used to approximate integrals, generally involving target probability density functions. The use of several proposals allows for a…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…
Preferential sampling has attracted considerable attention in geostatistics since the pioneering work of Diggle et al. (2010). A variety of likelihood-based approaches have been developed to correct estimation bias by explicitly modelling…
Recent success in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods has shown that policy optimization with respect to an off-policy distribution via importance sampling is effective for sample reuse. In this paper, we show that the use of…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…
Assessing the effects of a policy based on observational data from a different policy is a common problem across several high-stake decision-making domains, and several off-policy evaluation (OPE) techniques have been proposed. However,…
We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a decision policy using past observational data. The outcome of a policy is measured in terms of a loss (aka. disutility or negative reward) and the main problem is making valid…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to accurately evaluate the performance of counterfactual policies using only offline logged data. Although many estimators have been developed, there is no single estimator that dominates the others, because…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo methodology for the approximation of intractable integrals, very often involving a target probability density function. The performance of IS heavily depends on the appropriate selection of…
We consider the problem of estimating an expected outcome from a stochastic simulation model. Our goal is to develop a theoretical framework on importance sampling for such estimation. By investigating the variance of an importance sampling…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) constructs confidence intervals for the value of a target policy using data generated under a different behavior policy. Most existing inference methods focus on fixed target policies and may fail when the target…