{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/policy-learning-for-many-outcomes-of-interest","title":"Policy learning for many outcomes of interest: Combining optimal policy trees with multi-objective Bayesian optimisation","arxiv_id":"2212.06312","date":"2022-12-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Patrick Rehill","Nicholas Biddle"],"abstract":"Methods for learning optimal policies use causal machine learning models to create human-interpretable rules for making choices around the allocation of different policy interventions. However, in realistic policy-making contexts, decision-makers often care about trade-offs between outcomes, not just single-mindedly maximising utility for one outcome. This paper proposes an approach termed Multi-Objective Policy Learning (MOPoL) which combines optimal decision trees for policy learning with a multi-objective Bayesian optimisation approach to explore the trade-off between multiple outcomes. It does this by building a Pareto frontier of non-dominated models for different hyperparameter settings which govern outcome weighting. The key here is that a low-cost greedy tree can be an accurate proxy for the very computationally costly optimal tree for the purposes of making decisions which means models can be repeatedly fit to learn a Pareto frontier. The method is applied to a real-world case-study of non-price rationing of anti-malarial medication in Kenya.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.06312v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.06312v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"policy-learning-for-many-outcomes-of-interest","repo_url":"https://github.com/pbrehill/optimalpolicymobo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"bayesian-optimisation","task_name":"Bayesian Optimisation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}