Identification of Subgroups With Similar Benefits in Off-Policy Policy Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to identify subgroups within data where confident estimates of heterogeneous treatment effects can be made, enhancing personalized decision-making in off-policy evaluation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel loss function that incorporates uncertainty to improve subgroup identification for confident HTE estimation.

Findings

Effective in forming accurate HTE predictions

Outperforms existing methods in low-data scenarios

Enhances personalization in policy evaluation

Abstract

Off-policy policy evaluation methods for sequential decision making can be used to help identify if a proposed decision policy is better than a current baseline policy. However, a new decision policy may be better than a baseline policy for some individuals but not others. This has motivated a push towards personalization and accurate per-state estimates of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs). Given the limited data present in many important applications, individual predictions can come at a cost to accuracy and confidence in such predictions. We develop a method to balance the need for personalization with confident predictions by identifying subgroups where it is possible to confidently estimate the expected difference in a new decision policy relative to a baseline. We propose a novel loss function that accounts for uncertainty during the subgroup partitioning phase. In experiments, we show that our method can be used to form accurate predictions of HTEs where other methods struggle.