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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

When decision-makers can directly intervene, policy evaluation algorithms give valid causal estimates. In off-policy evaluation (OPE), there may exist unobserved variables that both impact the dynamics and are used by the unknown behavior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-05 David Bruns-Smith

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) is an important practical problem in algorithmic ranking systems, where the goal is to estimate the expected performance of a new ranking policy using only offline logged data collected under a different, logging…

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

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-10 Han Wang , Yang Xu , Wenbin Lu , Rui Song

We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Konstantin Hess , Dennis Frauen , Valentyn Melnychuk , Stefan Feuerriegel

Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Chinmaya Kausik , Yangyi Lu , Kevin Tan , Maggie Makar , Yixin Wang , Ambuj Tewari

Unbiased recommender learning (URL) and off-policy evaluation/learning (OPE/L) techniques are effective in addressing the data bias caused by display position and logging policies, thereby consistently improving the performance of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-14 Tatsuki Takahashi , Chihiro Maru , Hiroko Shoji

Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Olivier Jeunen

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to accurately evaluate the performance of counterfactual policies using only offline logged data. Although many estimators have been developed, there is no single estimator that dominates the others, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Takuma Udagawa , Haruka Kiyohara , Yusuke Narita , Yuta Saito , Kei Tateno

We study the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational data while accounting for possible unobserved confounding. Previous approaches, which assume unconfoundedness, i.e., that no unobserved confounders affect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Nathan Kallus , Angela Zhou

Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Yudai Hayashi , Shuhei Goda , Yuta Saito

The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Olivier Jeunen , Aleksei Ustimenko

The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nicolò Felicioni , Michael Benigni , Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema

Unobserved confounding arises when an unmeasured feature influences both the treatment and the outcome, leading to biased causal effect estimates. This issue undermines observational studies in fields like economics, medicine, ecology or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Alexander Merkov , David Rohde , Alexandre Gilotte , Benjamin Heymann

Predictive algorithms inform consequential decisions in settings with selective labels: outcomes are observed only for units selected by past decision makers. This creates an identification problem under unobserved confounding -- when…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-07 Ashesh Rambachan , Amanda Coston , Edward Kennedy

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) 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

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

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
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