Oceania
Process-constrained batch Bayesian optimisation
Pratibha Vellanki, Santu Rana, Sunil Gupta, David Rubin, Alessandra Sutti, Thomas Dorin, Murray Height, Paul Sanders, Svetha Venkatesh
Prevailing batch Bayesian optimisation methods allow all control variables to be freely altered at each iteration. Real-world experiments, however, often have physical limitations making it time-consuming to alter all settings for each recommendation in a batch. This gives rise to a unique problem in BO: in a recommended batch, a set of variables that are expensive to experimentally change need to be fixed, while the remaining control variables can be varied. We formulate this as a process-constrained batch Bayesian optimisation problem. We propose two algorithms, pc-BO(basic) and pc-BO(nested).
Representation Learning for Treatment Effect Estimation from Observational Data
Liuyi Yao, Sheng Li, Yaliang Li, Mengdi Huai, Jing Gao, Aidong Zhang
Estimating individual treatment effect (ITE) is a challenging problem in causal inference, due to the missing counterfactuals and the selection bias. Existing ITE estimation methods mainly focus on balancing the distributions of control and treated groups, but ignore the local similarity information that provides meaningful constraints on the ITE estimation. In this paper, we propose a local similarity preserved i ndividual t reatment effect (SITE) estimation method based on deep representation learning. SITE preserves local similarity and balances data distributions simultaneously, by focusing on several hard samples in each mini-batch. Experimental results on synthetic and three real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of the proposed SITE method, compared with the state-of-the-art ITE estimation methods.