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Poster
Distributionally Robust Policy Evaluation and Learning in Offline Contextual Bandits
Nian Si · Fan Zhang · Zhengyuan Zhou · Jose Blanchet

Tue Jul 14 07:00 AM -- 07:45 AM & Tue Jul 14 08:00 PM -- 08:45 PM (PDT) @

Policy learning using historical observational data is an important problem that has found widespread applications. However, existing literature rests on the crucial assumption that the future environment where the learned policy will be deployed is the same as the past environment that has generated the data–an assumption that is often false or too coarse an approximation. In this paper, we lift this assumption and aim to learn a distributionally robust policy with bandit observational data. We propose a novel learning algorithm that is able to learn a robust policy to adversarial perturbations and unknown covariate shifts. We first present a policy evaluation procedure in the ambiguous environment and also give a heuristic algorithm to solve the distributionally robust policy learning problems efficiently. Additionally, we provide extensive simulations to demonstrate the robustness of our policy.

Author Information

Nian Si (Stanford University)
Fan Zhang (Stanford University)
Zhengyuan Zhou (Stanford University)
Jose Blanchet (Stanford University)

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