English
Related papers

Related papers: Efficient and Sharp Off-Policy Learning under Unob…

200 papers

Empirical researchers and decision-makers spanning various domains frequently seek profound insights into the long-term impacts of interventions. While the significance of long-term outcomes is undeniable, an overemphasis on them may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Peng Wu , Ziyu Shen , Feng Xie , Zhongyao Wang , Chunchen Liu , Yan Zeng

This paper studies the statistical theory of batch data reinforcement learning with function approximation. Consider the off-policy evaluation problem, which is to estimate the cumulative value of a new target policy from logged history…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang

This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor , Uri Shalit

We study the problem of learning conditional average treatment effects (CATE) from high-dimensional, observational data with unobserved confounders. Unobserved confounders introduce ignorance -- a level of unidentifiability -- about an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Andrew Jesson , Sören Mindermann , Yarin Gal , Uri Shalit

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

Decision Focused Learning has emerged as a critical paradigm for integrating machine learning with downstream optimisation. Despite its promise, existing methodologies predominantly rely on probabilistic models and focus narrowly on task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Keivan Shariatmadar , Neil Yorke-Smith , Ahmad Osman , Fabio Cuzzolin , Hans Hallez , David Moens

In causal inference, sensitivity models assess how unmeasured confounders could alter causal analyses, but the sensitivity parameter -- which quantifies the degree of unmeasured confounding -- is often difficult to interpret. For this…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-04 Alec McClean , Zach Branson , Edward H. Kennedy

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

We consider imitation learning problems where the learner's ability to mimic the expert increases throughout the course of an episode as more information is revealed. One example of this is when the expert has access to privileged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , J. Andrew Bagnell , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Unobserved confounding is one of the greatest challenges for causal discovery. The case in which unobserved variables have a widespread effect on many of the observed ones is particularly difficult because most pairs of variables are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-26 Alexis Bellot , Mihaela van der Schaar

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Aurélien F. Bibaut , Ivana Malenica , Nikos Vlassis , Mark J. van der Laan

We present a new approach to the problems of evaluating and learning personalized decision policies from observational data of past contexts, decisions, and outcomes. Only the outcome of the enacted decision is available and the historical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-04 Nathan Kallus

Unmeasured confounding presents a common challenge in observational studies, potentially making standard causal parameters unidentifiable without additional assumptions. Given the increasing availability of diverse data sources, exploiting…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-18 Shanshan Luo , Yechi Zhang , Wei Li

In this work, we address the challenging problem of long-horizon goal-reaching policy learning from non-expert, action-free observation data. Unlike fully labeled expert data, our data is more accessible and avoids the costly process of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-09 RenMing Huang , Shaochong Liu , Yunqiang Pei , Peng Wang , Guoqing Wang , Yang Yang , Hengtao Shen

This paper introduces tools for assessing the sensitivity, to unobserved confounding, of a common estimator of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome that employs weights: the weighted linear regression of the outcome on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Leonard Wainstein , Chad Hazlett

The identification of causal effects in observational studies typically relies on two standard assumptions: unconfoundedness and overlap. However, both assumptions are often questionable in practice: unconfoundedness is inherently…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-17 Han Cui , Xinran Li

This paper proposes a novel approach for constructing effective personalized policies when the observed data lacks counter-factual information, is biased and possesses many features. The approach is applicable in a wide variety of settings…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-11 Onur Atan , William R. Zame , Qiaojun Feng , Mihaela van der Schaar

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a critical challenge in robust decision-making that seeks to assess the performance of a new policy using data collected under a different policy. However, the existing OPE methodologies suffer from several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq

Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Da Xu , Yuting Ye , Chuanwei Ruan , Bo Yang

This paper is concerned with constructing a confidence interval for a target policy's value offline based on a pre-collected observational data in infinite horizon settings. Most of the existing works assume no unmeasured variables exist…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-07 Chengchun Shi , Jin Zhu , Ye Shen , Shikai Luo , Hongtu Zhu , Rui Song