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The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…
This article describes an approach to incorporate expert opinion on observable quantities through the use of a loss function which updates a prior belief as opposed to specifying parameters on the priors. Eliciting information on observable…
The relative performance of competing point forecasts is usually measured in terms of loss or scoring functions. It is widely accepted that these scoring function should be strictly consistent in the sense that the expected score is…
This study explores the prediction of high-frequency price changes using deep learning models. Although state-of-the-art methods perform well, their complexity impedes the understanding of successful predictions. We found that an…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…
When learning is used to inform decisions about humans, such as for loans, hiring, or admissions, this can incentivize users to strategically modify their features, at a cost, to obtain positive predictions. The common assumption is that…
Functional data analysis is a fast evolving branch of statistics. Estimation procedures for the popular functional linear model either suffer from lack of robustness or are computationally burdensome. To address these shortcomings, a…
We study the problem when a firm sets prices for products based on the transaction data, i.e., which product past customers chose from an assortment and what were the historical prices that they observed. Our approach does not impose a…
Product feature recommendations are critical for online customers to purchase the right products based on the right features. For a customer, selecting the product that has the best trade-off between price and functionality is a…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the method that attempts to estimate the performance of decision making policies using historical data generated by different policies without conducting costly online A/B tests. Accurate OPE is essential in…
Although behavioral economics has demonstrated that there are many situations where rational choice is a poor empirical model, it has so far failed to provide quantitative models of economic problems such as price formation. We make a step…
Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
An efficient policy search algorithm should estimate the local gradient of the objective function, with respect to the policy parameters, from as few trials as possible. Whereas most policy search methods estimate this gradient by observing…
The valuation process that economic agents undergo for investments with uncertain payoff typically depends on their statistical views on possible future outcomes, their attitudes toward risk, and, of course, the payoff structure itself.…
The detection of outliers is of critical importance in the assurance of data quality. Outliers may exist in observed data or in data derived from these observed data, such as estimates and forecasts. An outlier may indicate a problem with…
Recommendation systems are an important units in today's e-commerce applications, such as targeted advertising, personalized marketing and information retrieval. In recent years, the importance of contextual information has motivated…
Learning user preferences for products based on their past purchases or reviews is at the cornerstone of modern recommendation engines. One complication in this learning task is that some users are more likely to purchase products or review…
Causal effect estimation from observational data is a crucial but challenging task. Currently, only a limited number of data-driven causal effect estimation methods are available. These methods either provide only a bound estimation of the…
Virtually all machine learning tasks are characterized using some form of loss function, and "good performance" is typically stated in terms of a sufficiently small average loss, taken over the random draw of test data. While optimizing for…