Related papers: Counterfactual Influence in Markov Decision Proces…
Reinforcement learning (RL) tasks are typically framed as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), assuming that decisions are made at fixed time intervals. However, many applications of great importance, including healthcare, do not satisfy this…
Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically…
The online Markov decision process (MDP) is a generalization of the classical Markov decision process that incorporates changing reward functions. In this paper, we propose practical online MDP algorithms with policy iteration and…
Counterfactual inference aims to answer retrospective "what if" questions and thus belongs to the most fine-grained type of inference in Pearl's causality ladder. Existing methods for counterfactual inference with continuous outcomes aim at…
Counterfactual explanations indicate the smallest change in input that can translate to a different outcome for a machine learning model. Counterfactuals have generated immense interest in high-stakes applications such as finance,…
Probabilities of Causation play a fundamental role in decision making in law, health care and public policy. Nevertheless, their point identification is challenging, requiring strong assumptions such as monotonicity. In the absence of such…
We propose a new approach to the problem of searching a space of policies for a Markov decision process (MDP) or a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), given a model. Our approach is based on the following observation: Any…
Complex behaviors are often driven by an internal model, which integrates sensory information over time and facilitates long-term planning. Inferring an agent's internal model is a crucial ingredient in social interactions (theory of mind),…
Estimating an individual's potential outcomes under counterfactual treatments is a challenging task for traditional causal inference and supervised learning approaches when the outcome is high-dimensional (e.g. gene expressions, impulse…
In many practical applications, decision-making processes must balance the costs of acquiring information with the benefits it provides. Traditional control systems often assume full observability, an unrealistic assumption when…
We study a new model where the potential outcomes, corresponding to the values of a (possibly continuous) treatment, are linked through common factors. The factors can be estimated using a panel of regressors. We propose a procedure to…
In these notes we will tackle the problem of finding optimal policies for Markov decision processes (MDPs) which are not fully known to us. Our intention is to slowly transition from an offline setting to an online (learning) setting.…
We consider a hidden Markov model with multiple observation processes, one of which is chosen at each point in time by a policy---a deterministic function of the information state---and attempt to determine which policy minimises the…
Analyzing decision problems under uncertainty commonly relies on idealizing assumptions about the describability of the world, with the most prominent examples being the closed world and the small world assumption. Most assumptions are…
Despite their enormous predictive power, machine learning models are often unsuitable for applications in regulated industries such as finance, due to their limited capacity to provide explanations. While model-agnostic frameworks such as…
We consider a finite number of $N$ statistically equal agents, each moving on a finite set of states according to a continuous-time Markov Decision Process (MDP). Transition intensities of the agents and generated rewards depend not only on…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a fundamental model for decision making under uncertainty. They exhibit non-deterministic choice as well as probabilistic uncertainty. Traditionally, verification algorithms assume exact knowledge of the…
An important problem in econometrics and marketing is to infer the causal impact that a designed market intervention has exerted on an outcome metric over time. This paper proposes to infer causal impact on the basis of a…
A Markov decision process can be parameterized by a transition kernel and a reward function. Both play essential roles in the study of reinforcement learning as evidenced by their presence in the Bellman equations. In our inquiry of various…
Attribution techniques explain the outcome of an AI model by assigning a numerical score to its inputs. So far, these techniques have mainly focused on attributing importance to static input features at a single point in time, and thus fail…