论文标题
与瓦斯汀距离的分配强大的政策学习
Distributionally Robust Policy Learning with Wasserstein Distance
论文作者
论文摘要
治疗的影响通常是异质的,具体取决于可观察到的特征,并且有必要利用这种异质性来设计个性化的治疗规则(ITRS)。这种ITR的现有估计方法假设可用的实验或观察数据是从实施估计策略的目标人群中得出的。但是,由于有用的数据有限,该假设通常在实践中失败。在这种情况下,决策者必须依靠源人群中产生的数据,这与目标人群不同。不幸的是,现有的估计方法不一定在新环境中正如预期的那样起作用,并且需要在这种情况下实现合理目标的策略。这项研究检查了分布鲁棒优化(DRO)的应用,该优化正式对目标人群的歧义并适应了集合中最坏的情况。结果表明,具有基于Wasserstein的DRO对歧义的表征提供了简单的直觉和简单的估计方法。然后,我为分布稳健的ITR开发一个估计器,并评估其理论性能。经验应用表明,所提出的方法的表现优于目标人群的天真方法。
The effects of treatments are often heterogeneous, depending on the observable characteristics, and it is necessary to exploit such heterogeneity to devise individualized treatment rules (ITRs). Existing estimation methods of such ITRs assume that the available experimental or observational data are derived from the target population in which the estimated policy is implemented. However, this assumption often fails in practice because of limited useful data. In this case, policymakers must rely on the data generated in the source population, which differs from the target population. Unfortunately, existing estimation methods do not necessarily work as expected in the new setting, and strategies that can achieve a reasonable goal in such a situation are required. This study examines the application of distributionally robust optimization (DRO), which formalizes an ambiguity about the target population and adapts to the worst-case scenario in the set. It is shown that DRO with Wasserstein distance-based characterization of ambiguity provides simple intuitions and a simple estimation method. I then develop an estimator for the distributionally robust ITR and evaluate its theoretical performance. An empirical application shows that the proposed approach outperforms the naive approach in the target population.