Related papers: Off-policy estimation with adaptively collected da…

Off-policy learning and evaluation leverage logged bandit feedback datasets, which contain context, action, propensity score, and feedback for each data point. These scenarios face significant challenges due to high variance and poor…

Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data.…

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…

Imitation learning enables autonomous agents to learn from human examples, without the need for a reward signal. Still, if the provided dataset does not encapsulate the task correctly, or when the task is too complex to be modeled, such…

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) needs an environment to collect fresh data, which is impractical when online interactions are costly. Offline RL provides an alternative solution by directly learning from the previously collected…

Estimating causal effects from observational network data is a significant but challenging problem. Existing works in causal inference for observational network data lack an analysis of the generalization bound, which can theoretically…

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the problem of slate contextual bandits where a policy selects multi-dimensional actions known as slates. This problem is widespread in recommender systems, search engines, marketing, to medical…

In offline reinforcement learning, weighted regression is a common method to ensure the learned policy stays close to the behavior policy and to prevent selecting out-of-sample actions. In this work, we show that due to the limited…

One of the most significant challenges in Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation is the statistical discrepancy between distinct treatment groups. To address this issue, we propose a model-agnostic data augmentation method…

Ranking interfaces are everywhere in online platforms. There is thus an ever growing interest in their Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE), aiming towards an accurate performance evaluation of ranking policies using logged data. A de-facto approach…

This study designs an adaptive experiment for efficiently estimating average treatment effects (ATEs). In each round of our adaptive experiment, an experimenter sequentially samples an experimental unit, assigns a treatment, and observes…

When data is collected in an adaptive manner, even simple methods like ordinary least squares can exhibit non-normal asymptotic behavior. As an undesirable consequence, hypothesis tests and confidence intervals based on asymptotic normality…

Imputing missing potential outcomes using an estimated regression function is a natural idea for estimating causal effects. In the literature, estimators that combine imputation and regression adjustments are believed to be comparable to…

We revisit the classical causal inference problem of estimating the average treatment effect in the presence of fully observed confounding variables using two-stage semiparametric methods. In existing theoretical studies of methods such as…

We study the problem of constructing an estimator of the average treatment effect (ATE) with observational data. The celebrated doubly-robust, augmented-IPW (AIPW) estimator generally requires consistent estimation of both nuisance…

Optimizing survival outcomes, such as patient survival or customer retention, is a critical objective in data-driven decision-making. Off-Policy Evaluation~(OPE) provides a powerful framework for assessing such decision-making policies…

Inverse propensity weighting (IPW) is a popular method for estimating treatment effects from observational data. However, its correctness relies on the untestable (and frequently implausible) assumption that all confounders have been…

Ordinal outcomes are common in clinical settings where they often represent increasing levels of disease progression or different levels of functional impairment. Such outcomes can characterize differences in meaningful patient health…

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

The weighted average treatment effect (WATE) is a causal measure for the comparison of interventions in a specific target population, which may be different from the population where data are sampled from. For instance, when the goal is to…