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Collaborating Authors

 Martin, Matthieu


Sequential Counterfactual Risk Minimization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Counterfactual Risk Minimization (CRM) is a framework for dealing with the logged bandit feedback problem, where the goal is to improve a logging policy using offline data. In this paper, we explore the case where it is possible to deploy learned policies multiple times and acquire new data. We extend the CRM principle and its theory to this scenario, which we call "Sequential Counterfactual Risk Minimization (SCRM)." We introduce a novel counterfactual estimator and identify conditions that can improve the performance of CRM in terms of excess risk and regret rates, by using an analysis similar to restart strategies in accelerated optimization methods. We also provide an empirical evaluation of our method in both discrete and continuous action settings, and demonstrate the benefits of multiple deployments of CRM.


Individual Treatment Prescription Effect Estimation in a Low Compliance Setting

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Individual Treatment Effect (ITE) estimation is an extensively researched problem, with applications in various domains. We model the case where there exists heterogeneous non-compliance to a randomly assigned treatment, a typical situation in health (because of non-compliance to prescription) or digital advertising (because of competition and ad blockers for instance). The lower the compliance, the more the effect of treatment prescription, or individual prescription effect (IPE), signal fades away and becomes hard to estimate. We propose a new approach for the estimation of the IPE that takes advantage of observed compliance information to prevent signal fading. Using the Structural Causal Model framework and do-calculus, we define a general mediated causal effect setting and propose a corresponding estimator which consistently recovers the IPE with asymptotic variance guarantees. Finally, we conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets that highlight the benefit of the approach, which consistently improves state-of-the-art in low compliance settings