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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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-20 Yuta Saito , Takuma Udagawa , Kei Tateno

Predictive models are often introduced to decision-making tasks under the rationale that they improve performance over an existing decision-making policy. However, it is challenging to compare predictive performance against an existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Luke Guerdan , Amanda Coston , Kenneth Holstein , Zhiwei Steven Wu

The presence of uncertainty in policy evaluation significantly complicates the process of policy ranking and selection in real-world settings. We formally consider offline policy selection as learning preferences over a set of policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Mengjiao Yang , Bo Dai , Ofir Nachum , George Tucker , Dale Schuurmans

When faced with sequential decision-making problems, it is often useful to be able to predict what would happen if decisions were made using a new policy. Those predictions must often be based on data collected under some previously used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Yash Chandak , Scott Niekum , Bruno Castro da Silva , Erik Learned-Miller , Emma Brunskill , Philip S. Thomas

In reinforcement learning, it is typical to use the empirically observed transitions and rewards to estimate the value of a policy via either model-based or Q-fitting approaches. Although straightforward, these techniques in general yield…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Ilya Kostrikov , Ofir Nachum

We consider the batch (off-line) policy learning problem in the infinite horizon Markov Decision Process. Motivated by mobile health applications, we focus on learning a policy that maximizes the long-term average reward. We propose a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-09-20 Peng Liao , Zhengling Qi , Runzhe Wan , Predrag Klasnja , Susan Murphy

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Masahiro Kato , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu , Shota Yasui

We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

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 consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-07-23 Mert Demirer , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Greg Lewis , Victor Chernozhukov

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) have received rising interest due to its appealing data efficiency. The present study addresses behavior estimation, a task that lays the foundation of many offline RL algorithms. Behavior estimation aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Guoxi Zhang , Hisashi Kashima

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) for episodic Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with continuous states. Motivated by the recently proposed proximal causal inference framework, we develop a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Rui Miao , Zhengling Qi , Xiaoke Zhang

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

We study the statistical complexity of offline decision-making with function approximation, establishing (near) minimax-optimal rates for stochastic contextual bandits and Markov decision processes. The performance limits are captured by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Raman Arora

In this work we investigate an importance sampling approach for evaluating policies for a structurally time-varying factored Markov decision process (MDP), i.e. the policy's value is estimated with a high-probability confidence interval. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-07 Carmel Fiscko , Soummya Kar , Bruno Sinopoli

We study offline reinforcement learning problems with a long-run average reward objective. The state-action pairs generated by any fixed behavioral policy thus follow a Markov chain, and the {\em empirical} state-action-next-state…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Mengmeng Li , Daniel Kuhn , Tobias Sutter

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Allen Nie , Yash Chandak , Christina J. Yuan , Anirudhan Badrinath , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Emma Brunskil

Offline reinforcement learning, wherein one uses off-policy data logged by a fixed behavior policy to evaluate and learn new policies, is crucial in applications where experimentation is limited such as medicine. We study the estimation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

In Offline Model Learning for Planning and in Offline Reinforcement Learning, the limited data set hinders the estimate of the Value function of the relative Markov Decision Process (MDP). Consequently, the performance of the obtained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Giorgio Angelotti , Nicolas Drougard , Caroline Ponzoni Carvalho Chanel

This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Brandon Trabucco , Albert Qu , Simon Li , Ganeshkumar Ashokavardhanan