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We introduce a novel doubly-robust (DR) off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimator for Markov decision processes, DRUnknown, designed for situations where both the logging policy and the value function are unknown. The proposed estimator…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-03 Kyungbok Lee , Myunghee Cho Paik

Reinforcement Learning aims at identifying and evaluating efficient control policies from data. In many real-world applications, the learner is not allowed to experiment and cannot gather data in an online manner (this is the case when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Daniele Foffano , Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Yash Chandak , Shiv Shankar , Nathaniel D. Bastian , Bruno Castro da Silva , Emma Brunskil , Philip S. Thomas

We study Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandit settings with large action spaces. The benchmark estimators suffer from severe bias and variance tradeoffs. Parametric approaches suffer from bias due to difficulty specifying the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-15 Tatsuhiro Shimizu , Laura Forastiere

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) of contextual bandit policies for large discrete action spaces where conventional importance-weighting approaches suffer from excessive variance. To circumvent this variance issue, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-12 Yuta Saito , Qingyang Ren , Thorsten Joachims

We explore off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) in contextual combinatorial bandits (CCB), where a policy selects a subset in the action space. For example, it might choose a set of furniture pieces (a bed and a drawer) from available…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-22 Tatsuhiro Shimizu , Koichi Tanaka , Ren Kishimoto , Haruka Kiyohara , Masahiro Nomura , Yuta Saito

Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-19 Ian Waudby-Smith , Lili Wu , Aaditya Ramdas , Nikos Karampatziakis , Paul Mineiro

When observed decisions depend only on observed features, off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) methods for sequential decision making problems can estimate the performance of evaluation policies before deploying them. This assumption is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-13 Hongseok Namkoong , Ramtin Keramati , Steve Yadlowsky , Emma Brunskill

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) from multiple logging policies, each generating a dataset of fixed size, i.e., stratified sampling. Previous work noted that in this setting the ordering of the variances of different importance sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Nathan Kallus , Yuta Saito , Masatoshi Uehara

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-03 Yang Xu , Jin Zhu , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Rui Song

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-18 Connor Douglas , Joel Persson , Foster Provost

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy using historical data collected under a different logging policy. OPE methods typically assume overlap between the target and logging policy, enabling…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-12 Samir Khan , Martin Saveski , Johan Ugander

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-15 Masahiro Kato

This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the presence of unmeasured confounders. Inspired by the two-way fixed effects regression model widely used in the panel data literature, we propose a two-way unmeasured confounding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Shuguang Yu , Shuxing Fang , Ruixin Peng , Zhengling Qi , Fan Zhou , Chengchun Shi

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of evaluating new policies using historical data obtained from a different policy. In the recent OPE context, most studies have focused on single-player cases, and not on multi-player cases. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Kenshi Abe , Yusuke Kaneko

In this work, we consider the problem of estimating a behaviour policy for use in Off-Policy Policy Evaluation (OPE) when the true behaviour policy is unknown. Via a series of empirical studies, we demonstrate how accurate OPE is strongly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Aniruddh Raghu , Omer Gottesman , Yao Liu , Matthieu Komorowski , Aldo Faisal , Finale Doshi-Velez , Emma Brunskill

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, which aims to estimate the value function of a target policy based on the offline data collected by a behavior policy. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Yifei Min , Tianhao Wang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

We offer an experimental benchmark and empirical study for off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning, which is a key problem in many safety critical applications. Given the increasing interest in deploying learning-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Cameron Voloshin , Hoang M. Le , Nan Jiang , Yisong Yue

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Arjun Sondhi , David Arbour , Drew Dimmery

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is widely applied in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and e-commerce to evaluate the efficacy of novel products or policies from offline datasets. This paper introduces a causal deepset framework that relaxes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-26 Runpeng Dai , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou , Shikai Luo , Zhiwei Qin , Chengchun Shi , Hongtu Zhu