Related papers: Inverse Propensity Score based offline estimator f…
Inverse Ising inference allows pairwise interactions of complex binary systems to be reconstructed from empirical correlations. Typical estimators used for this inference, such as Pseudo-likelihood maximization (PLM), are biased. Using the…
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…
Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal with uninformative signals due to position in the ranking, saliency, and other presentation factors.…
Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI) is a recently proposed statistical inference technique for parameter estimation that leverages pseudo-labels on both labeled and unlabeled data to construct an unbiased, low-variance estimator. In this…
In many real-world applications of machine learning classifiers, it is essential to predict the probability of an example belonging to a particular class. This paper proposes a simple technique for predicting probabilities based on…
We propose iterative proportional scaling (IPS) via decomposable submodels for maximizing likelihood function of a hierarchical model for contingency tables. In ordinary IPS the proportional scaling is performed by cycling through the…
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…
Learning to rank with implicit feedback is one of the most important tasks in many real-world information systems where the objective is some specific utility, e.g., clicks and revenue. However, we point out that existing methods based on…
Selection bias is prevalent in the data for training and evaluating recommendation systems with explicit feedback. For example, users tend to rate items they like. However, when rating an item concerning a specific user, most of the…
Existing studies on preference optimization (PO) have centered on constructing pairwise preference data following simple heuristics, such as maximizing the margin between preferred and dispreferred completions based on human (or AI) ranked…
Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…
Traditional insurance pricing relies on risk-based principles that ensure actuarial fairness and solvency but do not explicitly account for policyholders' price sensitivity. We formulate insurance pricing as a decision-making problem and…
Inverse problems use physical measurements along with a computational model to estimate the parameters or state of a system of interest. Errors in measurements and uncertainties in the computational model lead to inaccurate estimates. This…
Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides an effective way to overcome the challenges of designing reward and the high costs of online interaction. However, since labeling preference needs real-time human feedback,…
The propensity score is widely used for causal inference in observational studies, but common parametric estimators can produce biased and inefficient effect estimates when model assumptions are violated. Nonparametric approaches reduce…
The study of online decision-making problems that leverage contextual information has drawn notable attention due to their significant applications in fields ranging from healthcare to autonomous systems. In modern applications, contextual…
We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…
This paper proposes new estimators for the propensity score that aim to maximize the covariate distribution balance among different treatment groups. Heuristically, our proposed procedure attempts to estimate a propensity score model by…
We provide a new algorithmic framework for differentially private estimation of general functions that adapts to the hardness of the underlying dataset. We build upon previous work that gives a paradigm for selecting an output through the…
A scoring rule is a function of a probabilistic forecast and a corresponding outcome that is used to evaluate forecast performance. A wide range of scoring rules have been defined over time and there is some debate as to which are the most…