Related papers: Two-way Deconfounder for Off-policy Evaluation in …
In this work, we consider the off-policy policy evaluation problem for contextual bandits and finite horizon reinforcement learning in the nonstationary setting. Reusing old data is critical for policy evaluation, but existing estimators…
Estimating direct and indirect causal effects from observational data is crucial to understanding the causal mechanisms and predicting the behaviour under different interventions. Causal mediation analysis is a method that is often used to…
In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…
This study proposes the use of a social learning method to estimate a global state within a multi-agent off-policy actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) operating in a partially observable environment. We assume that the…
We present Causal Posterior Estimation (CPE), a novel method for Bayesian inference in simulator models, i.e., models where the evaluation of the likelihood function is intractable or too computationally expensive, but where one can…
The deconfounder was proposed as a method for estimating causal parameters in a context with multiple causes and unobserved confounding. It is based on recovery of a latent variable from the observed causes. We disentangle the causal…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…
Reliable treatment effect estimation from observational data depends on the availability of all confounding information. While much work has targeted treatment effect estimation from observational data, there is relatively little work in…
To estimate causal effects, analysts performing observational studies in health settings utilize several strategies to mitigate bias due to confounding by indication. There are two broad classes of approaches for these purposes: use of…
We propose the use of Bayesian networks, which provide both a mean value and an uncertainty estimate as output, to enhance the safety of learned control policies under circumstances in which a test-time input differs significantly from the…
In many social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences, treatment effect estimation is a crucial step in understanding the impact of an intervention, policy, or treatment. In recent years, an increasing emphasis has been placed on…
We study policy evaluation of offline contextual bandits subject to unobserved confounders. Sensitivity analysis methods are commonly used to estimate the policy value under the worst-case confounding over a given uncertainty set. However,…
Majority of off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms use overestimation bias control techniques. Most of these techniques rooted in heuristics, primarily addressing the consequences of overestimation rather than its fundamental origins.…
This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning with a focus on behavior policy estimation for importance sampling. Prior work has shown empirically that estimating a history-dependent behavior policy can lead to…
Monotonic policy improvement and off-policy learning are two main desirable properties for reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, by lower bounding the performance difference of two policies, we show that the monotonic policy…
In the causal adjustment setting, variable selection techniques based on either the outcome or treatment allocation model can result in the omission of confounders or the inclusion of spurious variables in the propensity score. We propose a…
Recent advances of gradient temporal-difference methods allow to learn off-policy multiple value functions in parallel with- out sacrificing convergence guarantees or computational efficiency. This opens up new possibilities for sound…
Causal effect estimation has been studied by many researchers when only observational data is available. Sound and complete algorithms have been developed for pointwise estimation of identifiable causal queries. For non-identifiable causal…
Uncertainty estimation is a key component in any deployed machine learning system. One way to evaluate uncertainty estimation is using "out-of-distribution" (OoD) detection, that is, distinguishing between the training data distribution and…
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…