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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

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) is an important practical problem in algorithmic ranking systems, where the goal is to estimate the expected performance of a new ranking policy using only offline logged data collected under a different, logging…

We offer an experimental benchmark and empirical study for off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning, which is a key problem in many safety critical applications. Given the increasing interest in deploying learning-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Cameron Voloshin , Hoang M. Le , Nan Jiang , Yisong Yue

Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the outcome of a new policy using historical data collected from a different policy. However, existing OPE methods cannot handle cases when the new policy introduces novel actions. This issue…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Hyunji Nam , Allen Nie , Ge Gao , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Emma Brunskill

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables but the behavior policy depends on latent states (Tennenholtz et al. (2020a)). Prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Yash Nair , Nan Jiang

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) for episodic Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with continuous states. Motivated by the recently proposed proximal causal inference framework, we develop a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Rui Miao , Zhengling Qi , Xiaoke Zhang

Ordinal classification problems, where labels exhibit a natural order, are prevalent in high-stakes fields such as medicine and finance. Accurate uncertainty quantification, including the decomposition into aleatoric (inherent variability)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Stefan Haas , Eyke Hüllermeier

The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Wenshuo Guo , Michael I. Jordan , Angela Zhou

Off-policy evaluation is critical in a number of applications where new policies need to be evaluated offline before online deployment. Most existing methods focus on the expected return, define the target parameter through averaging and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-10 Yingying Zhang , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo

Off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) use offline observational data to make better decisions, which is crucial in applications where online experimentation is limited. However, depending entirely on logged data, OPE/L is sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao , Kaiwen Wang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Yash Chandak , Shiv Shankar , Nathaniel D. Bastian , Bruno Castro da Silva , Emma Brunskil , Philip S. Thomas

We introduce a novel doubly-robust (DR) off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimator for Markov decision processes, DRUnknown, designed for situations where both the logging policy and the value function are unknown. The proposed estimator…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-03 Kyungbok Lee , Myunghee Cho Paik

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where the evaluation policy depends only on observable variables and the behavior policy depends on unobservable latent variables. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Chengchun Shi , Masatoshi Uehara , Jiawei Huang , Nan Jiang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-28 Haruka Kiyohara , Masatoshi Uehara , Yusuke Narita , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yasuo Yamamoto , Yuta Saito

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) is employed to assess the potential impact of a hypothetical policy using logged contextual bandit feedback, which is crucial in areas such as personalized medicine and recommender systems, where online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Yuqi Bai , Ziyu Zhao , Chenxin Lyu , Minqin Zhu , Kun Kuang

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

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

We study the problem of off-policy policy evaluation (OPPE) in RL. In contrast to prior work, we consider how to estimate both the individual policy value and average policy value accurately. We draw inspiration from recent work in causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Omer Gottesman , Aniruddh Raghu , Matthieu Komorowski , Aldo Faisal , Finale Doshi-Velez , Emma Brunskill

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) of contextual bandit policies for large discrete action spaces where conventional importance-weighting approaches suffer from excessive variance. To circumvent this variance issue, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-12 Yuta Saito , Qingyang Ren , Thorsten Joachims

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