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Related papers: Generalizing Off-Policy Evaluation From a Causal P…

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We develop a generic data-driven method for estimator selection in off-policy policy evaluation settings. We establish a strong performance guarantee for the method, showing that it is competitive with the oracle estimator, up to a constant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Yi Su , Pavithra Srinath , Akshay Krishnamurthy

Human-factor analysis typically employs correlation analysis and significance testing to identify relationships between variables. However, these descriptive ('what-is') methods, while effective for identifying associations, are often…

Applications · Statistics 2025-12-03 Xia Chen , Ruiji Sun , Philipp Geyer , André Borrmann , Stefano Schiavon

Randomized experiments are an excellent tool for estimating internally valid causal effects with the sample at hand, but their external validity is frequently debated. While classical results on the estimation of Population Average…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-13 Apoorva Lal , Wenjing Zheng , Simon Ejdemyr

Case-control designs are an important tool in contrasting the effects of well-defined treatments. In this paper, we reconsider classical concepts, assumptions and principles and explore when the results of case-control studies can be…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-05-06 Bas B. L. Penning de Vries , Rolf H. H. Groenwold

Causal inference is a science with multi-disciplinary evolution and applications. On the one hand, it measures effects of treatments in observational data based on experimental designs and rigorous statistical inference to draw causal…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-05 Jingying Zeng , Run Wang

To draw scientifically meaningful conclusions and build reliable models of quantitative phenomena, cause and effect must be taken into consideration (either implicitly or explicitly). This is particularly challenging when the measurements…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Max A. Little , Reham Badawy

Selection bias is pervasive in observational studies. For example, large scale biobanks data can exhibit ``healthy volunteer bias'' when respondents are healthier and of higher socio-economic status than the population they are meant to…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Yiwen Qiu , Filip Kovacevic , Shimeng Huang , Peter Spirtes , Francesco Locatello

Causal structure learning from observational data remains a non-trivial task due to various factors such as finite sampling, unobserved confounding factors, and measurement errors. Constraint-based and score-based methods tend to suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Rezaur Rashid , Jawad Chowdhury , Gabriel Terejanu

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in continuous treatment settings, such as personalized dose-finding. In OPE, one aims to estimate the mean outcome under a new treatment decision rule using historical data generated by a different…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-08 Hengrui Cai , Chengchun Shi , Rui Song , Wenbin Lu

We present new results on average causal effects in settings with unmeasured exposure-outcome confounding. Our results are motivated by a class of estimands, e.g., frequently of interest in medicine and public health, that are currently not…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-25 Lan Wen , Aaron L. Sarvet , Mats J. Stensrud

We study the novel problem of future off-policy evaluation (F-OPE) and learning (F-OPL) for estimating and optimizing the future value of policies in non-stationary environments, where distributions vary over time. In e-commerce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Tatsuhiro Shimizu , Kazuki Kawamura , Takanori Muroi , Yusuke Narita , Kei Tateno , Takuma Udagawa , Yuta Saito

We show that it is possible to understand and identify a decision maker's subjective causal judgements by observing her preferences over interventions. Following Pearl [2000], we represent causality using causal models (also called…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-01-23 Joseph Y. Halpern , Evan Piermont

This paper addresses the problem of policy selection in domains with abundant logged data, but with a restricted interaction budget. Solving this problem would enable safe evaluation and deployment of offline reinforcement learning policies…

Causal inference from observational data requires assumptions. These assumptions range from measuring confounders to identifying instruments. Traditionally, causal inference assumptions have focused on estimation of effects for a single…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-04 Rajesh Ranganath , Adler Perotte

Our evolution as a species made a huge step forward when we understood the relationships between causes and effects. These associations may be trivial for some events, but they are not in complex scenarios. To rigorously prove that some…

Mathematical Software · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Martí Pedemonte , Jordi Vitrià , Álvaro Parafita

Estimating causal effects from observational data is inherently challenging due to the lack of observable counterfactual outcomes and even the presence of unmeasured confounding. Traditional methods often rely on restrictive, untestable…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-07 Li Chen , Xiaotong Shen , Wei Pan

We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Konstantin Hess , Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel

Outcome-dependent sampling designs are extensively utilized in various scientific disciplines, including epidemiology, ecology, and economics, with retrospective case-control studies being specific examples of such designs. Additionally, if…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-22 Min Zeng , Zeyang Jia , Zijian Sui , Jinfeng Xu , Hong Zhang

We study distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE), of which the goal is to learn the distribution of the return for a target policy using offline data generated by a different policy. The theoretical foundation of many existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-13 Sungee Hong , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

In settings where units' outcomes are affected by others' treatments, there has been a proliferation of ways to quantify effects of treatments on outcomes, including via indirect exposure to other units' treatments. Here we consider two…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Sahil Loomba , Dean Eckles