Related papers: Feature Selection for Personalized Policy Analysis

We present an algorithm for local, regularized, policy improvement in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to formulate model-based and model-free variants in a single framework. Our algorithm can be interpreted as a natural extension…

Evidence-based policy-making requires reliable, spatially disaggregated indicators. The framework of mixed effects random forests leverages the advantages of random forests and hierarchical data in small area estimation. These methods…

Random forests is a common non-parametric regression technique which performs well for mixed-type unordered data and irrelevant features, while being robust to monotonic variable transformations. Standard random forests, however, do not…

We propose a novel method to model nonlinear regression problems by adapting the principle of penalization to Partial Least Squares (PLS). Starting with a generalized additive model, we expand the additive component of each variable in…

Policymakers and researchers often seek to understand how a policy differentially affects a population and the pathways driving this heterogeneity. For example, when studying an excise tax on sweetened beverages, researchers might assess…

Penalized regression methods, most notably the lasso, are a popular approach to analyzing high-dimensional data. An attractive property of the lasso is that it naturally performs variable selection. An important area of concern, however, is…

Many scientific and engineering challenges -- ranging from personalized medicine to customized marketing recommendations -- require an understanding of treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a non-parametric causal forest…

Training generally capable agents that thoroughly explore their environment and learn new and diverse skills is a long-term goal of robot learning. Quality Diversity Reinforcement Learning (QD-RL) is an emerging research area that blends…

Recently, personalized federated learning (pFL) has attracted increasing attention in privacy protection, collaborative learning, and tackling statistical heterogeneity among clients, e.g., hospitals, mobile smartphones, etc. Most existing…

Feature subsampling is a core component of random forests and other ensemble methods. While recent theory suggests that this randomization acts solely as a variance reduction mechanism analogous to ridge regularization, these results…

The identification of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) across subgroups is of significant interest in clinical trial analysis. Several state-of-the-art HTE estimation methods, including causal forests, apply recursive partitioning for…

Despite their sophisticated general-purpose capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail to align with diverse individual preferences because standard post-training methods, like Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF),…

Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative model training across multiple distributed clients without disclosing their raw data. Personalized federated learning (pFL) has gained…

Direct policy search (DPS) and look-ahead tree (LT) policies are two widely used classes of techniques to produce high performance policies for sequential decision-making problems. To make DPS approaches work well, one crucial issue is to…

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) to accommodate diverse user preferences is essential for enhancing alignment and user satisfaction. Traditional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches often rely on monolithic…

Random forests are a powerful method for non-parametric regression, but are limited in their ability to fit smooth signals, and can show poor predictive performance in the presence of strong, smooth effects. Taking the perspective of random…

Causal random forests provide efficient estimates of heterogeneous treatment effects. However, forest algorithms are also well-known for their black-box nature, and therefore, do not characterize how input variables are involved in…

Propensity Score Matching (PSM) is a causal inference technique that is used as a substitution for experimental methods when it is not possible to implement them due to logistical and ethical concerns. By using a logistic classifier to…

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example,…

Feature selection has been studied widely in the literature. However, the efficacy of the selection criteria for low sample size applications is neglected in most cases. Most of the existing feature selection criteria are based on the…