Goto

Collaborating Authors

 var






On Dynamic Programming Decompositions of Static Risk Measures in Markov Decision Processes

Neural Information Processing Systems

Risk-averse reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to provide a risk-averse policy for high-stakes real-world decision problems. These high-stake domains include autonomous driving (Jin et al., 2019; Sharma et al., 2020), robot collision avoidance (Ahmadi et al., 2021; Hakobyan and Y ang, 2021),


CrossGNN: Confronting Noisy Multivariate Time Series Via Cross Interaction Refinement

Neural Information Processing Systems

To address the above issues, we propose CrossGNN, a linear complexity GNN model to refine the cross-scale and cross-variable interaction for MTS. To deal with the unexpected noise in time dimension, an adaptive multi-scale identifier (AMSI) is leveraged to construct multi-scale time series with reduced noise.




Many Experiments, Few Repetitions, Unpaired Data, and Sparse Effects: Is Causal Inference Possible?

Schur, Felix, Pfister, Niklas, Ding, Peng, Mukherjee, Sach, Peters, Jonas

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study the problem of estimating causal effects under hidden confounding in the following unpaired data setting: we observe some covariates $X$ and an outcome $Y$ under different experimental conditions (environments) but do not observe them jointly; we either observe $X$ or $Y$. Under appropriate regularity conditions, the problem can be cast as an instrumental variable (IV) regression with the environment acting as a (possibly high-dimensional) instrument. When there are many environments but only a few observations per environment, standard two-sample IV estimators fail to be consistent. We propose a GMM-type estimator based on cross-fold sample splitting of the instrument-covariate sample and prove that it is consistent as the number of environments grows but the sample size per environment remains constant. We further extend the method to sparse causal effects via $\ell_1$-regularized estimation and post-selection refitting.


Lost in Aggregation: The Causal Interpretation of the IV Estimand

Tsao, Danielle, Muandet, Krikamol, Eberhardt, Frederick, Perković, Emilija

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible. However, justifying the validity of the instrument often poses a significant challenge. In this work, we highlight a problem generally neglected in arguments for instrumental variable validity: the presence of an ''aggregate treatment variable'', where the treatment (e.g., education, GDP, caloric intake) is composed of finer-grained components that each may have a different effect on the outcome. We show that the causal effect of an aggregate treatment is generally ambiguous, as it depends on how interventions on the aggregate are instantiated at the component level, formalized through the aggregate-constrained component intervention distribution. We then characterize conditions on the interventional distribution and the aggregate setting under which standard instrumental variable estimators identify the aggregate effect. The contrived nature of these conditions implies major limitations on the interpretation of instrumental variable estimates based on aggregate treatments and highlights the need for a broader justificatory base for the exclusion restriction in such settings.