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Model misspecification is ubiquitous in data analysis because the data-generating process is often complex and mathematically intractable. Therefore, assessing estimation uncertainty and conducting statistical inference under a possibly…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-19 Rong Li , Yichen Qin , Yang Li

With the fast development of big data, learning the optimal decision rule by recursively updating it and making online decisions has been easier than before. We study the online statistical inference of model parameters in a contextual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-22 Xiangyu Chang , Xi Chen , Zehua Lai , He Li , Zhihong Liu , Yichen Zhang

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a contextual bandit policy prior to deployment. As such, OPE plays a critical role in ensuring safety in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. However, standard OPE approaches are limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Aishwarya Mandyam , Kalyani Limaye , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emily Alsentzer

Given n experiment subjects with potentially heterogeneous covariates and two possible treatments, namely active treatment and control, this paper addresses the fundamental question of determining the optimal accuracy in estimating the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-13 Jiachun Li , David Simchi-Levi , Yunxiao Zhao

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

We consider the actor-critic contextual bandit for the mobile health (mHealth) intervention. State-of-the-art decision-making algorithms generally ignore the outliers in the dataset. In this paper, we propose a novel robust contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-28 Feiyun Zhu , Jun Guo , Ruoyu Li , Junzhou Huang

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

Dynamic decision-making under model uncertainty is central to many economic environments, yet existing bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms rely on the assumption of correct model specification. This paper studies the behavior and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-20 Xinyu Dai , Daniel Chen , Yian Qian

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Aishwarya Mandyam , Shengpu Tang , Jiayu Yao , Jenna Wiens , Barbara E. Engelhardt

Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Noveen Sachdeva , Yi Su , Thorsten Joachims

We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Matteo Papini

Multifidelity approximation is an important technique in scientific computation and simulation. In this paper, we introduce a bandit-learning approach for leveraging data of varying fidelities to achieve precise estimates of the parameters…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-02-22 Yiming Xu , Vahid Keshavarzzadeh , Robert M. Kirby , Akil Narayan

Decisions based partly or solely on predictions from probabilistic models may be sensitive to model misspecification. Statisticians are taught from an early stage that "all models are wrong", but little formal guidance exists on how to…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-09 James Watson , Chris Holmes

Contextual MDPs are powerful tools with wide applicability in areas from biostatistics to machine learning. However, specializing them to offline datasets has been challenging due to a lack of robust, theoretically backed methods. Our work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-06 Riddhiman Bhattacharyya , Sayak Chakrabarty , Imon Banerjee

What is the most statistically efficient way to do off-policy evaluation and optimization with batch data from bandit feedback? For log data generated by contextual bandit algorithms, we consider offline estimators for the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-07 Yusuke Narita , Shota Yasui , Kohei Yata

We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-27 Hung Tran-The , Sunil Gupta , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Santu Rana , Svetha Venkatesh

The multi-armed bandit problem is a core framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical algorithms often fail in environments with hidden, time-varying states that confound reward estimation and optimal action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jikai Jin , Kenneth Hung , Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Baoyi Shi , Congshan Zhang

Adaptively collected data has become ubiquitous within modern practice. However, even seemingly benign adaptive sampling schemes can introduce severe biases, rendering traditional statistical inference tools inapplicable. This can be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Wei Fan , Kevin Tan , Yuting Wei

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

We study the problem of the identification of m arms with largest means under a fixed error rate $\delta$ (fixed-confidence Top-m identification), for misspecified linear bandit models. This problem is motivated by practical applications,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Clémence Réda , Andrea Tirinzoni , Rémy Degenne