Counterfactual Self-Training

Ruijiang Gao, Max Biggs, Wei Sun, Ligong Han

Keywords: self-training, counterfactual inference

Abstract: Unlike traditional supervised learning, in many settings only partial feedback is available. We may only observe outcomes for the chosen actions, but not the counterfactual outcomes associated with other alternatives. Such settings encompass a wide variety of applications including pricing, online marketing and precision medicine. A key challenge is that observational data are influenced by historical policies deployed in the system, yielding a biased data distribution. We approach this task as a domain adaptation problem and propose a self-training algorithm which imputes outcomes for the unseen actions in the observational data to simulate a randomized trial. We offer a theoretical motivation for this approach by providing an upper bound on the generalization error defined on a randomized trial under the self-training objective. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on both synthetic and real datasets.

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