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Poster
Optimal and Adaptive Off-policy Evaluation in Contextual Bandits
Yu-Xiang Wang · Alekh Agarwal · Miro Dudik

Tue Aug 08 01:30 AM -- 05:00 AM (PDT) @ Gallery #49
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We study the off-policy evaluation problem---estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy---under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model of rewards and establish a minimax lower bound on the mean squared error (MSE). The bound is matched up to constants by the inverse propensity scoring (IPS) and doubly robust (DR) estimators. This highlights the difficulty of the agnostic contextual setting, in contrast with multi-armed bandits and contextual bandits with access to a consistent reward model, where IPS is suboptimal. We then propose the SWITCH estimator, which can use an existing reward model (not necessarily consistent) to achieve a better bias-variance tradeoff than IPS and DR. We prove an upper bound on its MSE and demonstrate its benefits empirically on a diverse collection of datasets, often outperforming prior work by orders of magnitude.

Author Information

Yu-Xiang Wang (Carnegie Mellon University / Amazon AWS)
Alekh Agarwal (Microsoft Research)
Miro Dudik (Microsoft Research)
Miro Dudik

Miroslav Dudík is a Senior Principal Researcher in machine learning at Microsoft Research, NYC. His research focuses on combining theoretical and applied aspects of machine learning, statistics, convex optimization, and algorithms. Most recently he has worked on contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, and algorithmic fairness. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2007. He is a co-creator of the Fairlearn toolkit for assessing and improving the fairness of machine learning models and of the Maxentpackage for modeling species distributions, which is used by biologists around the world to design national parks, model the impacts of climate change, and discover new species.

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