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We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in an infinite-horizon Markov decision process with continuous states and actions. We recast the $Q$-function estimation into a special form of the nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-28 Xiaohong Chen , Zhengling Qi

It has become increasingly common for data to be collected adaptively, for example using contextual bandits. Historical data of this type can be used to evaluate other treatment assignment policies to guide future innovation or experiments.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-22 Ruohan Zhan , Vitor Hadad , David A. Hirshberg , Susan Athey

Inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPW) has been well applied in causal inference to estimate population-level estimands from observational studies. For time-to-event outcomes, the failure time distribution can be estimated by…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-13 Yuhao Deng , Rui Wang

When estimating causal effects from observational data with numerous covariates, employing penalized covariate selection can improve the estimation efficiency. Outcome-oriented covariate selection, which involves selecting covariates…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-14 Wataru Hongo , Shuji Ando , Jun Tsuchida , Takashi Sozu

Online decision-making problem requires us to make a sequence of decisions based on incremental information. Common solutions often need to learn a reward model of different actions given the contextual information and then maximize the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-15 Haoyu Chen , Wenbin Lu , Rui Song

This work studies the statistical limits of uniform convergence for offline policy evaluation (OPE) problems with model-based methods (for episodic MDP) and provides a unified framework towards optimal learning for several well-motivated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

Missing data is an universal problem in statistics. We develop a unified framework for estimating parameters defined by general estimating equations under a missing-at-random (MAR) mechanism, based on generalized entropy calibration…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Mst Moushumi Pervin , Hengfang Wang , Jae Kwang Kim

We study the probability tail properties of Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) estimators of the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) when there is limited overlap between the covariate distributions of the treatment and control groups. Under…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-12-12 Jonathan B. Hill , Saraswata Chaudhuri

It is important to estimate the local average treatment effect (LATE) when compliance with a treatment assignment is incomplete. The previously proposed methods for LATE estimation required all relevant variables to be jointly observed in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-22 Kazuhiko Shinoda , Takahiro Hoshino

Estimation of the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) is a core problem in causal inference with strong connections to Off-Policy Evaluation in Reinforcement Learning. This paper considers the problem of adaptively selecting the treatment…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-22 Ojash Neopane , Aaditya Ramdas , Aarti Singh

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

Existing weighting methods for treatment effect estimation are often built upon the idea of propensity scores or covariate balance. They usually impose strong assumptions on treatment assignment or outcome model to obtain unbiased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Dongcheng Zhang , Kunpeng Zhang

In reinforcement learning, off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the expected return of an evaluation policy given a fixed dataset that was collected by running one or more different policies. One of the more empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Brahma S. Pavse , Josiah P. Hanna

The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-06 Xuqiao Li , Ying Yan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-12 Omer Gottesman , Joseph Futoma , Yao Liu , Sonali Parbhoo , Leo Anthony Celi , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn an agent from pre-collected datasets, avoiding unsafe and inefficient real-time interaction. However, inevitable access to out-ofdistribution actions during the learning process introduces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Fan Zhang , Baoru Huang , Xin Zhang

We study the off-policy evaluation problem---estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy---under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Yu-Xiang Wang , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudik

We consider the problem of efficient inference of the Average Treatment Effect in a sequential experiment where the policy governing the assignment of subjects to treatment or control can change over time. We first provide a central limit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-05 Thomas Cook , Alan Mishler , Aaditya Ramdas

In many observational studies in social science and medicine, subjects or units are connected, and one unit's treatment and attributes may affect another's treatment and outcome, violating the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA)…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-06-25 Zhaonan Qu , Ruoxuan Xiong , Jizhou Liu , Guido Imbens

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation for reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate the expected reward of a target policy $\pi$ using offline data collected by running a logging policy $\mu$. Standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang