Kernel Treatment Effects with Adaptively Collected Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zenati, Houssam, Bozkurt, Bariscan, Gretton, Arthur
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zenati, Houssam
Bozkurt, Bariscan
Gretton, Arthur
author_facet Zenati, Houssam
Bozkurt, Bariscan
Gretton, Arthur
contents Adaptive experiments improve efficiency by adjusting treatment assignments based on past outcomes, but this adaptivity breaks the i.i.d.\ assumptions that underpin classical asymptotics. At the same time, many questions of interest are distributional, extending beyond average effects. Kernel treatment effects (KTE) provide a flexible framework by representing interventional outcome distributions in an RKHS and comparing them via kernel distances. We present the first kernel-based framework for distributional inference under adaptive data collection. Our method combines doubly robust RKHS scores with a witness function learned on one fold, and performs inference on a second fold using a projected, sequentially normalized scalar statistic with valid type-I error. Experiments show that the resulting procedure is well calibrated and effective for both mean shifts and higher-moment differences, outperforming adaptive baselines limited to scalar effects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_10245
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Kernel Treatment Effects with Adaptively Collected Data
Zenati, Houssam
Bozkurt, Bariscan
Gretton, Arthur
Machine Learning
Methodology
Adaptive experiments improve efficiency by adjusting treatment assignments based on past outcomes, but this adaptivity breaks the i.i.d.\ assumptions that underpin classical asymptotics. At the same time, many questions of interest are distributional, extending beyond average effects. Kernel treatment effects (KTE) provide a flexible framework by representing interventional outcome distributions in an RKHS and comparing them via kernel distances. We present the first kernel-based framework for distributional inference under adaptive data collection. Our method combines doubly robust RKHS scores with a witness function learned on one fold, and performs inference on a second fold using a projected, sequentially normalized scalar statistic with valid type-I error. Experiments show that the resulting procedure is well calibrated and effective for both mean shifts and higher-moment differences, outperforming adaptive baselines limited to scalar effects.
title Kernel Treatment Effects with Adaptively Collected Data
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10245