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Policy gradient methods are notorious for having a large variance and high sample complexity. To mitigate this, we introduce SoftTreeMax -- a generalization of softmax that employs planning. In SoftTreeMax, we extend the traditional logits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Gal Dalal , Assaf Hallak , Gugan Thoppe , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik

Machine learning (ML) estimates of conditional average treatment effects (CATE) can guide policy decisions, either by allowing targeting of individuals with beneficial CATE estimates, or as inputs to decision trees that optimise overall…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-10-04 Julia Hatamyar , Noemi Kreif

Many real-world problems require making sequences of decisions where the outcomes of each decision are probabilistic and uncertain, and the availability of different actions is constrained by the outcomes of previous actions. There is a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-28 Berk Ozturk , She'ifa Punla-Green , Les Servi

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

Computing an optimal classification tree that provably maximizes training performance within a given size limit, is NP-hard, and in practice, most state-of-the-art methods do not scale beyond computing optimal trees of depth three.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Catalin E. Brita , Jacobus G. M. van der Linden , Emir Demirović

Classification and Regression Trees (CARTs) are off-the-shelf techniques in modern Statistics and Machine Learning. CARTs are traditionally built by means of a greedy procedure, sequentially deciding the splitting predictor variable(s) and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-25 Rafael Blanquero , Emilio Carrizosa , Cristina Molero-Río , Dolores Romero Morales

With the impact of real-time processing being realized in the recent past, the need for efficient implementations of reinforcement learning algorithms has been on the rise. Albeit the numerous advantages of Bellman equations utilized in RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Saumil Shivdikar , Jagannath Nirmal

In order to speed-up classification models when facing a large number of categories, one usual approach consists in organizing the categories in a particular structure, this structure being then used as a way to speed-up the prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-26 Aurélia Léon , Ludovic Denoyer

ODTLearn is an open-source Python package that provides methods for learning optimal decision trees for high-stakes predictive and prescriptive tasks based on the mixed-integer optimization (MIO) framework proposed in (Aghaei et al., 2021)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-03 Patrick Vossler , Sina Aghaei , Nathan Justin , Nathanael Jo , Andrés Gómez , Phebe Vayanos

We study the estimation of policy gradients for continuous-time systems with known dynamics. By reframing policy learning in continuous-time, we show that it is possible construct a more efficient and accurate gradient estimator. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Samuel Ainsworth , Kendall Lowrey , John Thickstun , Zaid Harchaoui , Siddhartha Srinivasa

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms, because their incremental and on-policy nature makes them more stable than the value-based counterparts. However, the same properties also make them slow to converge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Andrea Zanette , Ching-An Cheng , Alekh Agarwal

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

In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

Decision tree algorithms have been among the most popular algorithms for interpretable (transparent) machine learning since the early 1980's. The problem that has plagued decision tree algorithms since their inception is their lack of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Xiyang Hu , Cynthia Rudin , Margo Seltzer

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods in offline domains without additional online data collection, such as mobile health applications. Most of existing policy optimization algorithms in the computer science literature are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Yuan Le , Hongtu Zhu , Rui Song

We study finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation for both policy evaluation and policy optimization. Prior work established that statistically efficient learning is impossible for either of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Volodymyr Tkachuk , Csaba Szepesvári , Xiaoqi Tan

We address the problem of Bayesian reinforcement learning using efficient model-based online planning. We propose an optimism-free Bayes-adaptive algorithm to induce deeper and sparser exploration with a theoretical bound on its performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Divya Grover , Debabrota Basu , Christos Dimitrakakis

Decision-making plays a pivotal role in shaping outcomes in various disciplines, such as medicine, economics, and business. This paper provides guidance to practitioners on how to implement a decision tree designed to address treatment…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-06-05 Hugo Bodory , Federica Mascolo , Michael Lechner

Building models of human decision-making from observed behaviour is critical to better understand, diagnose and support real-world policies such as clinical care. As established policy learning approaches remain focused on imitation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Alizée Pace , Alex J. Chan , Mihaela van der Schaar