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The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nicolò Felicioni , Michael Benigni , Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema

We consider local kernel metric learning for off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic policies in contextual bandits with continuous action spaces. Our work is motivated by practical scenarios where the target policy needs to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Haanvid Lee , Jongmin Lee , Yunseon Choi , Wonseok Jeon , Byung-Jun Lee , Yung-Kyun Noh , Kee-Eung Kim

The Average Treatment Effect (ATE) is a global measure of the effectiveness of an experimental treatment intervention. Classical methods of its estimation either ignore relevant covariates or do not fully exploit them. Moreover, past work…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-11-05 Emil Pitkin , Richard Berk , Lawrence Brown , Andreas Buja , Ed George , Kai Zhang , Linda Zhao

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods aim to estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Aishwarya Mandyam , Jason Meng , Ge Gao , Jiankai Sun , Mac Schwager , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emma Brunskill

Causal inference typically assumes centralized access to individual-level data. Yet, in practice, data are often decentralized across multiple sites, making centralization infeasible due to privacy, logistical, or legal constraints. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-04 Rémi Khellaf , Aurélien Bellet , Julie Josse

There has been a recent surge in statistical methods for handling the lack of adequate positivity when using inverse probability weights (IPW). However, these nascent developments have raised a number of questions. Thus, we demonstrate the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-05 Roland A. Matsouaka , Yi Liu , Yunji Zhou

In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-20 Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Stefan Wager

Estimating the causal effects of interventions is crucial to policy and decision-making, yet outcome data are often missing or subject to non-standard measurement error. While ground-truth outcomes can sometimes be obtained through costly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-22 Ezinne Nwankwo , Lauri Goldkind , Angela Zhou

We study value adaptation in offline-to-online reinforcement learning under general function approximation. Starting from an imperfect offline pretrained $Q$-function, the learner aims to adapt it to the target environment using only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Shangzhe Li , Weitong Zhang

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits with finite action space. Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) weighting is a widely used method for OPE due to its unbiased, but it suffers from significant variance when the action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Kushagra Chandak , Vincent Liu , Haanvid Lee

Observational data have been actively used to estimate treatment effect, driven by the growing availability of electronic health records (EHRs). However, EHRs typically consist of longitudinal records, often introducing time-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Junghwan Lee , Simin Ma , Nicoleta Serban , Shihao Yang

We consider the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in contextual bandits, where the goal is to estimate the value of a target policy using the data collected by a logging policy. Most popular approaches to the OPE are variants of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-20 Sutanoy Dasgupta , Yabo Niu , Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil , Debdeep Pati , Bani Mallick

This paper studies offline reinforcement learning with linear function approximation in a setting with decision-theoretic, but not estimation sparsity. The structural restrictions of the data-generating process presume that the transitions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-24 Angela Zhou

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-04 Imad Aouali , Otmane Sakhi

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota

This paper develops a sensitivity analysis framework that transfers the average total treatment effect (ATTE) from source data with a fully observed network to target data whose network is completely unknown. The ATTE represents the average…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-17 Tadao Hoshino

The policy relevant treatment effect (PRTE) measures the average effect of switching from a status-quo policy to a counterfactual policy. Estimation of the PRTE involves estimation of multiple preliminary parameters, including propensity…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-07-17 Yuya Sasaki , Takuya Ura

Adaptive experimentation under unknown network interference requires solving two coupled problems: (i) learning the underlying dynamics of interference among units and (ii) using these dynamics to inform treatment allocation in order to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Aidan Gleich , Eric Laber , Alexander Volfovsky

Network data have appeared frequently in recent research. For example, in comparing the effects of different types of treatment, network models have been proposed to improve the quality of estimation and hypothesis testing. In this paper,…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-04 Zhixin Zhou , Ping Li , Feifang Hu

Randomized experiments are the gold standard for estimating treatment effects, yet network interference challenges the validity of traditional estimators by violating the stable unit treatment value assumption and introducing bias. While…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-02 Xin Lu , Hongzi Li , Hanzhong Liu