arXiv Machine Learning By Abhirami Pillai

Budget-Constrained Causal Bandits: Bridging Uplift Modeling and Sequential Decision-Making

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper introduces Budget-Constrained Causal Bandits (BCCB), an online framework that learns individual treatment effects, explores uncertain users, and manages budget pacing simultaneously. It derives a per-arrival decision rule from a KKT condition of a Lagrangian relaxation, providing a principled algorithmic foundation. Experiments on the Criteo Uplift dataset show BCCB outperforms offline pipelines and other online baselines, especially when historical data is scarce (below 7,500 observations).

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