EMSep 16, 2021
Policy Choice and Best Arm Identification: Asymptotic Analysis of Exploration SamplingKaito Ariu, Masahiro Kato, Junpei Komiyama et al.
We consider the "policy choice" problem -- otherwise known as best arm identification in the bandit literature -- proposed by Kasy and Sautmann (2021) for adaptive experimental design. Theorem 1 of Kasy and Sautmann (2021) provides three asymptotic results that give theoretical guarantees for exploration sampling developed for this setting. We first show that the proof of Theorem 1 (1) has technical issues, and the proof and statement of Theorem 1 (2) are incorrect. We then show, through a counterexample, that Theorem 1 (3) is false. For the former two, we correct the statements and provide rigorous proofs. For Theorem 1 (3), we propose an alternative objective function, which we call posterior weighted policy regret, and derive the asymptotic optimality of exploration sampling.
EMAug 3, 2021
Learning Causal Models from Conditional Moment Restrictions by Importance WeightingMasahiro Kato, Masaaki Imaizumi, Kenichiro McAlinn et al.
We consider learning causal relationships under conditional moment restrictions. Unlike causal inference under unconditional moment restrictions, conditional moment restrictions pose serious challenges for causal inference, especially in high-dimensional settings. To address this issue, we propose a method that transforms conditional moment restrictions to unconditional moment restrictions through importance weighting, using a conditional density ratio estimator. Using this transformation, we successfully estimate nonparametric functions defined under conditional moment restrictions. Our proposed framework is general and can be applied to a wide range of methods, including neural networks. We analyze the estimation error, providing theoretical support for our proposed method. In experiments, we confirm the soundness of our proposed method.
MEFeb 15, 2021
Controlling False Discovery Rates under Cross-Sectional CorrelationsJunpei Komiyama, Masaya Abe, Kei Nakagawa et al.
We consider controlling the false discovery rate for testing many time series with an unknown cross-sectional correlation structure. Given a large number of hypotheses, false and missing discoveries can plague an analysis. While many procedures have been proposed to control false discovery, most of them either assume independent hypotheses or lack statistical power. A problem of particular interest is in financial asset pricing, where the goal is to determine which ``factors" lead to excess returns out of a large number of potential factors. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we show the consistency of Fama and French's prominent method under multiple testing. Second, we propose a novel method for false discovery control using double bootstrapping. We achieve superior statistical power to existing methods and prove that the false discovery rate is controlled. Simulations and a real data application illustrate the efficacy of our method over existing methods.
LGOct 8, 2020
The Adaptive Doubly Robust Estimator for Policy Evaluation in Adaptive Experiments and a Paradox Concerning Logging PolicyMasahiro Kato, Shota Yasui, Kenichiro McAlinn
The doubly robust (DR) estimator, which consists of two nuisance parameters, the conditional mean outcome and the logging policy (the probability of choosing an action), is crucial in causal inference. This paper proposes a DR estimator for dependent samples obtained from adaptive experiments. To obtain an asymptotically normal semiparametric estimator from dependent samples with non-Donsker nuisance estimators, we propose adaptive-fitting as a variant of sample-splitting. We also report an empirical paradox that our proposed DR estimator tends to show better performances compared to other estimators utilizing the true logging policy. While a similar phenomenon is known for estimators with i.i.d. samples, traditional explanations based on asymptotic efficiency cannot elucidate our case with dependent samples. We confirm this hypothesis through simulation studies.
STNov 20, 2019
Equivariant online predictions of non-stationary time seriesKōsaku Takanashi, Kenichiro McAlinn
We discuss the finite sample theoretical properties of online predictions in non-stationary time series under model misspecification. To analyze the theoretical predictive properties of statistical methods under this setting, we first define the Kullback-Leibler risk, in order to place the problem within a decision theoretic framework. Under this framework, we show that a specific class of dynamic models -- random walk dynamic linear models -- produce exact minimax predictive densities. We first show this result under Gaussian assumptions, then relax this assumption using semi-martingale processes. This result provides a theoretical baseline, under both non-stationary and stationary time series data, for which other models can be compared against. We extend the result to the synthesis of multiple predictive densities. Three topical applications in epidemiology, climatology, and economics, confirm and highlight our theoretical results.