We study the off-policy evaluation problem— estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy—under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model of rewards and establish a minimax lower bound on the mean squared error (MSE). The bound is matched up to constants by the inverse propensity scoring (IPS) an...

Estimation of finite population totals in the presence of auxiliary information is considered. A class of estimators based on local polynomial regression is proposed. Like generalized regression estimators, these estimators are weighted linear combinations of study variables, in which the weights are calibrated to known control totals, but the assumptions on the superpopulation model are consid...