arXiv:2510.18161stat.MLcs.LG2025-10被引 3

解决治疗决策优化中的胜者诅咒,提升真实效果可信度

Beating the Winner's Curse via Inference-Aware Policy Optimization

  • 引入下游评估视角优化策略,兼顾预测收益与显著性检验通过率
  • 在模拟中验证新方法能显著减少虚假性能提升的误判
  • 适合医疗决策等需严格验证效果的高风险场景

近年来,基于个体特征自动学习治疗决策策略受到广泛关注。从业者希望确保所学策略在下游政策评估中表现优于现有策略。然而,由于胜者诅咒——优化过程利用预测误差而非真实改进——导致预测性能提升常无法在实际评估中验证。为此,本文提出一种新的推理感知策略优化方法,该方法在优化时考虑下游评估的特性,不仅优化估计的目标值,还优化估计改进量通过显著性检验的概率。我们数学刻画了这两项目标之间的帕累托前沿,并设计了一种基于机器学习模型估计该前沿的算法。决策者可在测试集上选择符合其权衡偏好的策略后,进行常规的策略评估。最后,通过模拟验证了该方法的有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

There has been a surge of recent interest in automatically learning policies to target treatment decisions based on rich individual covariates. In addition, practitioners want confidence that the learned policy has better performance than the incumbent policy according to downstream policy evaluation. However, due to the winner's curse -- an issue where the policy optimization procedure exploits prediction errors rather than finding actual improvements -- predicted performance improvements are often not substantiated by downstream policy evaluation. To address this challenge, we propose a novel strategy called inference-aware policy optimization, which modifies policy optimization to account for how the policy will be evaluated downstream. Specifically, it optimizes not only for the estimated objective value, but also for the chances that the estimate of the policy's improvement passes a significance test during downstream policy evaluation. We mathematically characterize the Pareto frontier of policies according to the tradeoff of these two goals. Based on our characterization, we design a policy optimization algorithm that estimates the Pareto frontier using machine learning models; then, the decision-maker can select the policy that optimizes their desired tradeoff, after which policy evaluation can be performed on the test set as usual. Finally, we perform simulations to illustrate the effectiveness of our methodology.

策略优化医疗决策统计推断

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