Bayesian Counterfactual Mean Embeddings and Off-Policy Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework for modeling the entire counterfactual distribution and uncertainty in treatment effects, extending to off-policy evaluation and data fusion scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes three novel Bayesian methods for estimating the ultimate treatment effect from noisy dependence data, and generalizes to off-policy evaluation with uncertainty quantification.

Findings

Methods effectively quantify epistemic uncertainty.

Framework successfully models multiple treatment effects.

Algorithms demonstrate good calibration in experimental settings.

Abstract

The counterfactual distribution models the effect of the treatment in the untreated group. While most of the work focuses on the expected values of the treatment effect, one may be interested in the whole counterfactual distribution or other quantities associated to it. Building on the framework of Bayesian conditional mean embeddings, we propose a Bayesian approach for modeling the counterfactual distribution, which leads to quantifying the epistemic uncertainty about the distribution. The framework naturally extends to the setting where one observes multiple treatment effects (e.g. an intermediate effect after an interim period, and an ultimate treatment effect which is of main interest) and allows for additionally modelling uncertainty about the relationship of these effects. For such goal, we present three novel Bayesian methods to estimate the expectation of the ultimate treatment effect, when only noisy samples of the dependence between intermediate and ultimate effects are provided. These methods differ on the source of uncertainty considered and allow for combining two sources of data. Moreover, we generalize these ideas to the off-policy evaluation framework, which can be seen as an extension of the counterfactual estimation problem. We empirically explore the calibration of the algorithms in two different experimental settings which require data fusion, and illustrate the value of considering the uncertainty stemming from the two sources of data.