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Related papers: IntOPE: Off-Policy Evaluation in the Presence of I…

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In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

Reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to transform real-world decision-making systems by enabling autonomous agents to learn from experience. Deploying RL in real-world settings, especially in the context of human-robot interaction,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Saurav Singh , Rodney Sanchez , Alexander Ororbia , Jamison Heard

Off-policy learning, referring to the procedure of policy optimization with access only to logged feedback data, has shown importance in various real-world applications, such as search engines, recommender systems, and etc. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Xiaoying Zhang , Junpu Chen , Hongning Wang , Hong Xie , Yang Liu , John C. S. Lui , Hang Li

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-13 Josiah P. Hanna , Scott Niekum , Peter Stone

In recommender systems (RecSys) and real-time bidding (RTB) for online advertisements, we often try to optimize sequential decision making using bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. In these applications, offline reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-20 Haruka Kiyohara , Kosuke Kawakami , Yuta Saito

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Sungee Hong , Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

Causal inference methods for treatment effect estimation usually assume independent units. However, this assumption is often questionable because units may interact, resulting in spillover effects between them. We develop augmented inverse…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-08 Corinne Emmenegger , Meta-Lina Spohn , Timon Elmer , Peter Bühlmann

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation from batched contextual bandit data with multidimensional actions, often termed slates. The problem is common to recommender systems and user-interface optimization, and it is particularly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Nikos Vlassis , Ashok Chandrashekar , Fernando Amat Gil , Nathan Kallus

Estimation and inference for the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) is a cornerstone of causal inference and often serves as the foundation for developing procedures for more complicated settings. Although traditionally analyzed in a batch…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-10 Ojash Neopane , Aaditya Ramdas , Aarti Singh

Off-policy evaluation provides an essential tool for evaluating the effects of different policies or treatments using only observed data. When applied to high-stakes scenarios such as medical diagnosis or financial decision-making, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Ziyang Tang , Yihao Feng , Na Zhang , Jian Peng , Qiang Liu

The growing availability of large health databases has expanded the use of observational studies for comparative effectiveness research. Unlike randomized trials, observational studies must adjust for systematic differences in patient…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Haidong Lu , Fan Li , Laine E. Thomas , Fan Li

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms often require careful hyperparameter tuning. Before deployment, we need to select amongst a set of candidate policies. However, there is limited understanding about the fundamental limits of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Vincent Liu , Prabhat Nagarajan , Andrew Patterson , Martha White

A platform trial with a master protocol provides an infrastructure to ethically and efficiently evaluate multiple treatment options in multiple diseases. Given that certain study drugs can enter or exit a platform trial, the randomization…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-15 Tianyu Zhan , Jane Zhang , Lei Shu , Yihua Gu

This paper proposes a new class of distributional causal quantities, referred to as the \textit{outcome conditioned partial policy effects} (OCPPEs), to measure the \textit{average} effect of a general counterfactual intervention of a…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-07-25 Zhengyu Zhang , Zequn Jin , Lihua Lin

Propensity score methods are increasingly being used to reduce estimation bias of treatment effects for observational studies. Previous research has shown that propensity score methods consistently estimate the marginal hazard ratio for…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-11-19 Haodi Liang , Cecilia Cotton

We offer a theoretical characterization of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning using function approximation for marginal importance weights and $q$-functions when these are estimated using recent minimax methods. Under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Masatoshi Uehara , Masaaki Imaizumi , Nan Jiang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun , Tengyang Xie

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

Chance imbalance in baseline characteristics is common in randomized clinical trials. Regression adjustment such as the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) is often used to account for imbalance and increase precision of the treatment effect…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-14 Shuxi Zeng , Fan Li , Rui Wang , Fan Li

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

The research in this paper gives a systematic investigation on the asymptotic behaviours of four inverse probability weighting (IPW)-based estimators for conditional average treatment effect, with nonparametrically, semiparametrically,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-24 Niwen Zhou , Lixing Zhu