Active Learning for Decision-Making from Imbalanced Observational Data

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A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa

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en

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10

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36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019, pp. 10578-10587, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research ; Volume 97

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Machine learning can help personalized decision support by learning models to predict individual treatment effects (ITE). This work studies the reliability of prediction-based decision-making in a task of deciding which action a to take for a target unit after observing its covariates x~ and predicted outcomes p^(y~∣x~,a). An example case is personalized medicine and the decision of which treatment to give to a patient. A common problem when learning these models from observational data is imbalance, that is, difference in treated/control covariate distributions, which is known to increase the upper bound of the expected ITE estimation error. We propose to assess the decision-making reliability by estimating the ITE model’s Type S error rate, which is the probability of the model inferring the sign of the treatment effect wrong. Furthermore, we use the estimated reliability as a criterion for active learning, in order to collect new (possibly expensive) observations, instead of making a forced choice based on unreliable predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this decision-making aware active learning in two decision-making tasks: in simulated data with binary outcomes and in a medical dataset with synthetic and continuous treatment outcomes.

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Sundin, I, Schulam, P, Siivola, E, Vehtari, A, Saria, S & Kaski, S 2019, Active Learning for Decision-Making from Imbalanced Observational Data. in 36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 97, JMLR, pp. 10578-10587, International Conference on Machine Learning, Long Beach, California, United States, 09/06/2019. < http://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/sundin19a.html >