Proceedings of Machine Learning Research

By Fengpei Li, Henry Lam, and Siddharth Prusty
Proceedings of the Twenty Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics | 2020

DOI

PMLR 108:352-362, 2020

Citation

Fengpei Li, Henry Lam, and Siddharth Prusty. “Robust Importance Weighting for Covariate Shift.” Proceedings of the Twenty Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, PMLR 108:352-362, 2020

Copyright

Proceedings of the Twenty Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2020

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Abstract

In many learning problems, the training and testing data follow different distributions and a particularly common situation is the \textit{covariate shift}. To correct for sampling biases, most approaches, including the popular kernel mean matching (KMM), focus on estimating the importance weights between the two distributions. Reweighting-based methods, however, are exposed to high variance when the distributional discrepancy is large. On the other hand, the alternate approach of using nonparametric regression (NR) incurs high bias when the training size is limited. In this paper, we propose and analyze a new estimator that systematically integrates the residuals of NR with KMM reweighting, based on a control-variate perspective. The proposed estimator can be shown to either strictly outperform or match the best-known existing rates for both KMM and NR, and thus is a robust combination of both estimators. The experiments shows the estimator works well in practice.

Siddharth Prusty is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Indian School of Business. He is a Quantitative Marketing researcher with primary interests in digital marketing, retail media, advertising auctions, sustainability, regulation, and AI. Methodologically, he uses techniques from mechanism design, structural modeling, analytical modeling, machine learning, and statistics, to solve strategic problems in his areas of interest. His research has been published in Marketing Science and the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research.

Professor Prusty received his PhD in Marketing from Duke University, his Master’s in Operations Research from Columbia University, and his undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a Data Analyst in the Risk Management division at American Express.

Siddharthprusty
Siddharth Prusty