Related papers: Combining Experimental and Historical Data for Pol…
The integration of data from multiple sources is increasingly used to achieve larger sample sizes and enhance population diversity. Our previous work established that, under random sampling from the same underlying population, integrating…
We study causal effect estimation from a mixture of observational and interventional data in a confounded linear regression model with multivariate treatments. We show that the statistical efficiency in terms of expected squared error can…
We provide a comparative study of several widely used off-policy estimators (Empirical Average, Basic Importance Sampling and Normalized Importance Sampling), detailing the different regimes where they are individually suboptimal. We then…
Estimation of mutual information between (multidimensional) real-valued variables is used in analysis of complex systems, biological systems, and recently also quantum systems. This estimation is a hard problem, and universally good…
The era of big data has witnessed an increasing availability of multiple data sources for statistical analyses. We consider estimation of causal effects combining big main data with unmeasured confounders and smaller validation data with…
Using state-level opioid overdose mortality data from 1999-2016, we simulated four time-varying treatment scenarios, which correspond to real-world policy dynamics (ramp up, ramp down, temporary and inconsistent). We then evaluated seven…
Motivated by the proliferation of observational datasets and the need to integrate non-randomized evidence with randomized controlled trials, causal inference researchers have recently proposed several new methodologies for combining biased…
We propose an optimum mechanism for providing monetary incentives to the data sources of a statistical estimator such as linear regression, so that high quality data is provided at low cost, in the sense that the sum of payments and…
Prediction Rule Ensembles (PREs) are robust and interpretable statistical learning techniques with potential for predictive analytics, yet their efficacy in the presence of missing data is untested. This study uses multiple imputation to…
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…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…
In this paper, we study the problem of optimal data collection for policy evaluation in linear bandits. In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected reward it will obtain when executed in a…
Observational cohort studies are increasingly being used for comparative effectiveness research to assess the safety of therapeutics. Recently, various doubly robust methods have been proposed for average treatment effect estimation by…
Auxiliary variable is extensively used in survey sampling to improve the precision of estimates. Whenever there is availability of auxiliary information, we want to utilize it in the method of estimation to obtain the most efficient…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) face inherent limitations, such as ethical or resource constraints, which lead to a limited number of study participants. To address these limitations, recent research endeavors have sought to incorporate…
Small area estimators that ignore the sampling design lack design consistency when the sampling mechanism is complex and may be severely biased under informative designs. Existing procedures that account for the survey weights under…
How should one combine noisy information from diverse sources to make an inference about an objective ground truth? This frequently recurring, normative question lies at the core of statistics, machine learning, policy-making, and everyday…
Off-policy evaluation is a key component of reinforcement learning which evaluates a target policy with offline data collected from behavior policies. It is a crucial step towards safe reinforcement learning and has been used in…
A general method to combine several estimators of the same quantity is investigated. In the spirit of model and forecast averaging, the final estimator is computed as a weighted average of the initial ones, where the weights are constrained…
Accurately evaluating new policies (e.g. ad-placement models, ranking functions, recommendation functions) is one of the key prerequisites for improving interactive systems. While the conventional approach to evaluation relies on online A/B…