Papers › Off-Policy Evaluation and Learning for External Validity under a Covariate Shift

Off-Policy Evaluation and Learning for External Validity under a Covariate Shift

26 Feb 2020NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:2002.11642archive 2025-07-28

Masahiro Kato, Masatoshi Uehara, Shota Yasui

We consider evaluating and training a new policy for the evaluation data by using the historical data obtained from a different policy. The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to estimate the expected reward of a new policy over the evaluation data, and that of off-policy learning (OPL) is to find a new policy that maximizes the expected reward over the evaluation data. Although the standard OPE and OPL assume the same distribution of covariate between the historical and evaluation data, a covariate shift often exists, i.e., the distribution of the covariate of the historical data is different from that of the evaluation data. In this paper, we derive the efficiency bound of OPE under a covariate shift. Then, we propose doubly robust and efficient estimators for OPE and OPL under a covariate shift by using a nonparametric estimator of the density ratio between the historical and evaluation data distributions. We also discuss other possible estimators and compare their theoretical properties. Finally, we confirm the effectiveness of the proposed estimators through experiments.

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process_args MasaKat0/OPE_CS/cs_ope/experiments/experiment_evaluation.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · b56a62e42a86420c · report
process_args MasaKat0/OPE_CS/cs_ope/experiments/experiment_learning.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · 06ebfec0a57daa95 · report
behavior_and_evaluation_policy MasaKat0/OPE_CS/cs_ope/experiments/experiment_evaluation.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 390de638e884cd30 · report
data_generation MasaKat0/OPE_CS/cs_ope/experiments/experiment_evaluation.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 15eac07dc38774a0 · report

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