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While the classic off-policy evaluation (OPE) literature commonly assumes decision time points to be evenly spaced for simplicity, in many real-world scenarios, such as those involving user-initiated visits, decisions are made at…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-17 Xin Chen , Wenbin Lu , Shu Yang , Dipankar Bandyopadhyay

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) considers problems where learning is performed using only previously collected samples and is helpful for the settings in which collecting new data is costly or risky. In model-based offline RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Mustafa O. Karabag , Ufuk Topcu

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning is an important problem in settings where experimentation is limited, such as education and healthcare. But, in these very same settings, observed actions are often confounded by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-29 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus , Lihong Li , Ali Mousavi

Statistical modeling plays a fundamental role in understanding the underlying mechanism of massive data (statistical inference) and predicting the future (statistical prediction). Although all models are wrong, researchers try their best to…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-17 Hangjin Jiang

Measurement error in observational datasets can lead to systematic bias in inferences based on these datasets. As studies based on observational data are increasingly used to inform decisions with real-world impact, it is critical that we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-29 Roy Adams , Yuelong Ji , Xiaobin Wang , Suchi Saria

Performance estimation aims at estimating the loss that a predictive model will incur on unseen data. These procedures are part of the pipeline in every machine learning project and are used for assessing the overall generalisation ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-31 Vitor Cerqueira , Luis Torgo , Igor Mozetic

This paper demonstrates a methodology for examining the accuracy of uncertain inference systems (UIS), after their parameters have been optimized, and does so for several common UIS's. This methodology may be used to test the accuracy when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-11 Ben P. Wise

Many real-world classification problems are significantly class-imbalanced to detriment of the class of interest. The standard set of proper evaluation metrics is well-known but the usual assumption is that the test dataset imbalance equals…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-16 Jan Brabec , Tomáš Komárek , Vojtěch Franc , Lukáš Machlica

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Matteo Papini

Off-policy evaluation of sequential decision policies from observational data is necessary in applications of batch reinforcement learning such as education and healthcare. In such settings, however, unobserved variables confound observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Nathan Kallus , Angela Zhou

Causal inference from observational data provides strong evidence for the best action in decision-making without performing expensive randomized trials. The effect of an action is usually not identifiable under unobserved confounding, even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Md Musfiqur Rahman , Ziwei Jiang , Hilaf Hasson , Murat Kocaoglu

In stochastic decision problems, one often wants to estimate the underlying probability measure statistically, and then to use this estimate as a basis for decisions. We shall consider how the uncertainty in this estimation can be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-05-24 Samuel N. Cohen

We study causal inference in experiments and quasi-experiments, where the economic outcome is imperfectly measured by a remotely sensed variable. The remotely sensed variable is low-cost, scalable, and predictive of the economic outcome in…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-20 Ashesh Rambachan , Rahul Singh , Davide Viviano

While on-policy algorithms are known for their stability, they often demand a substantial number of samples. In contrast, off-policy algorithms, which leverage past experiences, are considered sample-efficient but tend to exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Jianfei Ma

We consider the problem of goodness-of-fit testing for a model that has at least one unknown parameter that cannot be eliminated by transformation. Examples of such problems can be as simple as testing whether a sample consists of…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-28 Sean van der Merwe

Outlying observations are frequently encountered across a wide spectrum of scientific domains, posing notable challenges to the generalizability of statistical models and the reproducibility of downstream analysis. They are identified…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-17 Dongliang Zhang , Masoud Asgharian , Martin A. Lindquist

Policy learning utilizing observational data is pivotal across various domains, with the objective of learning the optimal treatment assignment policy while adhering to specific constraints such as fairness, budget, and simplicity. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-12 Pan Zhao , Antoine Chambaz , Julie Josse , Shu Yang

To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

It is well known that the historical logs are used for evaluating and learning policies in interactive systems, e.g. recommendation, search, and online advertising. Since direct online policy learning usually harms user experiences, it is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-06 Li He , Long Xia , Wei Zeng , Zhi-Ming Ma , Yihong Zhao , Dawei Yin

We provide methods to validate and compare sensor outputs, or inference algorithms applied to sensor data, by adapting statistical scoring rules. The reported output should either be in the form of a prediction interval or of a parameter…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-07-07 A. D. Martin , T. C. A. Molteno , M. Parry