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Hauptverfasser: Ishikawa, Kei, He, Niao, Kanamori, Takafumi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12450
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author Ishikawa, Kei
He, Niao
Kanamori, Takafumi
author_facet Ishikawa, Kei
He, Niao
Kanamori, Takafumi
contents We study policy evaluation of offline contextual bandits subject to unobserved confounders. Sensitivity analysis methods are commonly used to estimate the policy value under the worst-case confounding over a given uncertainty set. However, existing work often resorts to some coarse relaxation of the uncertainty set for the sake of tractability, leading to overly conservative estimation of the policy value. In this paper, we propose a general estimator that provides a sharp lower bound of the policy value using convex programming. The generality of our estimator enables various extensions such as sensitivity analysis with f-divergence, model selection with cross validation and information criterion, and robust policy learning with the sharp lower bound. Furthermore, our estimation method can be reformulated as an empirical risk minimization problem thanks to the strong duality, which enables us to provide strong theoretical guarantees of the proposed estimator using techniques of the M-estimation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_12450
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Convex Framework for Confounding Robust Inference
Ishikawa, Kei
He, Niao
Kanamori, Takafumi
Machine Learning
We study policy evaluation of offline contextual bandits subject to unobserved confounders. Sensitivity analysis methods are commonly used to estimate the policy value under the worst-case confounding over a given uncertainty set. However, existing work often resorts to some coarse relaxation of the uncertainty set for the sake of tractability, leading to overly conservative estimation of the policy value. In this paper, we propose a general estimator that provides a sharp lower bound of the policy value using convex programming. The generality of our estimator enables various extensions such as sensitivity analysis with f-divergence, model selection with cross validation and information criterion, and robust policy learning with the sharp lower bound. Furthermore, our estimation method can be reformulated as an empirical risk minimization problem thanks to the strong duality, which enables us to provide strong theoretical guarantees of the proposed estimator using techniques of the M-estimation.
title A Convex Framework for Confounding Robust Inference
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12450