2024 NIPS NeurIPS 2024

Two-way Deconfounder for Off-policy Evaluation in Causal Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

This paper studies off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the presence of unmeasured confounders. Inspired by the two-way fixed effects regression model widely used in the panel data literature, we propose a two-way unmeasured confounding assumption to model the system dynamics in causal reinforcement learning and develop a two-way deconfounder algorithm that devises a neural tensor network to simultaneously learn both the unmeasured confounders and the system dynamics, based on which a model-based estimator can be constructed for consistent policy value estimation. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed estimator through theoretical results and numerical experiments.

🌉 Interdisciplinary Bridge — Artificial Intelligence and Reinforcement Learning
🧭 Keyword Pioneer — model-based estimator
🐝 Cross-Pollinator — Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Data Science & Analytics, Deep Learning, Healthcare & Medicine, Interdisciplinary, Knowledge & Reasoning, Machine Learning, Mathematics & Optimization, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning, Speech & Audio