Related papers: Learning treatment effects while treating those in…
When a policy prioritizes one person over another, is it because they benefit more, or because they are preferred? This paper develops a method to uncover the values consistent with observed allocation decisions. We use machine learning…
Hierarchical random effect models are used for different purposes in clinical research and other areas. In general, the main focus is on population parameters related to the expected treatment effects or group differences among all units of…
We consider the problem of how to assign treatment in a randomized experiment, in which the correlation among the outcomes is informed by a network available pre-intervention. Working within the potential outcome causal framework, we…
Learning beneficial treatment allocations for a patient population is an important problem in precision medicine. Many treatments come with adverse side effects that are not commensurable with their potential benefits. Patients who do not…
Demand response is designed to motivate electricity customers to modify their loads at critical time periods. The accurate estimation of impact of demand response signals to customers' consumption is central to any successful program. In…
Many governmental bodies are adopting AI policies for decision-making. In particular, Reinforcement Learning has been used to design policies that citizens would be expected to follow if implemented. Much RL work assumes that citizens…
A/B testing is critical for modern technological companies to evaluate the effectiveness of newly developed products against standard baselines. This paper studies optimal designs that aim to maximize the amount of information obtained from…
Many interventions, such as vaccines in clinical trials or coupons in online marketplaces, must be assigned sequentially without full knowledge of their effects. Multi-armed bandit algorithms have proven successful in such settings.…
Modern treatment targeting methods often rely on estimating the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) using machine learning tools. While effective in identifying who benefits from treatment on the individual level, these approaches…
We consider estimation of an optimal individualized treatment rule from observational and randomized studies when a high-dimensional vector of baseline variables is available. Our optimality criterion is with respect to delaying expected…
Combating an epidemic entails finding a plan that describes when and how to apply different interventions, such as mask-wearing mandates, vaccinations, school or workplace closures. An optimal plan will curb an epidemic with minimal loss of…
The goal of policy learning is to train a policy function that recommends a treatment given covariates to maximize population welfare. There are two major approaches in policy learning: the empirical welfare maximization (EWM) approach and…
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…
Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…
We study the problem of allocating $T$ sequentially arriving items among $n$ homogeneous agents under the constraint that each agent must receive a pre-specified fraction of all items, with the objective of maximizing the agents' total…
Assigning resources in business processes execution is a repetitive task that can be effectively automated. However, different automation methods may give varying results that may not be optimal. Proper resource allocation is crucial as it…
Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…
Algorithms in public services such as child welfare, criminal justice, and education are increasingly being used to make high-stakes decisions about human lives. Drawing upon findings from a two-year ethnography conducted at a child welfare…
Consider a setting in which a policy maker assigns subjects to treatments, observing each outcome before the next subject arrives. Initially, it is unknown which treatment is best, but the sequential nature of the problem permits learning…
Practitioners in medicine, business, political science, and other fields are increasingly aware that decisions should be personalized to each patient, customer, or voter. A given treatment (e.g. a drug or advertisement) should be…