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Hugo Yèche

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

6 papers
2 author rows

Possible papers

6

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Delphic Offline Reinforcement Learning under Nonidentifiable Hidden Confounding

  • Alizée Pace
  • Hugo Yèche
  • Bernhard Schölkopf
  • Gunnar Rätsch
  • Guy Tennenholtz

A prominent challenge of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is the issue of hidden confounding: unobserved variables may influence both the actions taken by the agent and the observed outcomes. Hidden confounding can compromise the validity of any causal conclusion drawn from data and presents a major obstacle to effective offline RL. In the present paper, we tackle the problem of hidden confounding in the nonidentifiable setting. We propose a definition of uncertainty due to hidden confounding bias, termed delphic uncertainty, which uses variation over world models compatible with the observations, and differentiate it from the well-known epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. We derive a practical method for estimating the three types of uncertainties, and construct a pessimistic offline RL algorithm to account for them. Our method does not assume identifiability of the unobserved confounders, and attempts to reduce the amount of confounding bias. We demonstrate through extensive experiments and ablations the efficacy of our approach on a sepsis management benchmark, as well as on electronic health records. Our results suggest that nonidentifiable hidden confounding bias can be mitigated to improve offline RL solutions in practice.

ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Improving Neural Additive Models with Bayesian Principles

  • Kouroche Bouchiat
  • Alexander Immer
  • Hugo Yèche
  • Gunnar Rätsch
  • Vincent Fortuin

Neural additive models (NAMs) enhance the transparency of deep neural networks by handling input features in separate additive sub-networks. However, they lack inherent mechanisms that provide calibrated uncertainties and enable selection of relevant features and interactions. Approaching NAMs from a Bayesian perspective, we augment them in three primary ways, namely by a) providing credible intervals for the individual additive sub-networks; b) estimating the marginal likelihood to perform an implicit selection of features via an empirical Bayes procedure; and c) facilitating the ranking of feature pairs as candidates for second-order interaction in fine-tuned models. In particular, we develop Laplace-approximated NAMs (LA-NAMs), which show improved empirical performance on tabular datasets and challenging real-world medical tasks.

EWRL Workshop 2023 Workshop Paper

Delphic Offline Reinforcement Learning under Nonidentifiable Hidden Confounding

  • Alizée Pace
  • Hugo Yèche
  • Bernhard Schölkopf
  • Gunnar Ratsch
  • Guy Tennenholtz

A prominent challenge of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is the issue of hidden confounding: unobserved variables may influence both the actions taken by the agent and the observed outcomes. Hidden confounding can compromise the validity of any causal conclusion drawn from data and presents a major obstacle to effective offline RL. In the present paper, we tackle the problem of hidden confounding in the nonidentifiable setting. We propose a definition of uncertainty due to hidden confounding bias, termed delphic uncertainty, which uses variation over world models compatible with the observations, and differentiate it from the well-known epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. We derive a practical method for estimating the three types of uncertainties, and construct a pessimistic offline RL algorithm to account for them. Our method does not assume identifiability of the unobserved confounders, and attempts to reduce the amount of confounding bias. We demonstrate through extensive experiments and ablations the efficacy of our approach on a sepsis management benchmark, as well as on electronic health records. Our results suggest that nonidentifiable hidden confounding bias can be mitigated to improve offline RL solutions in practice.

ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Temporal Label Smoothing for Early Event Prediction

  • Hugo Yèche
  • Alizée Pace
  • Gunnar Rätsch
  • Rita Kuznetsova

Models that can predict the occurrence of events ahead of time with low false-alarm rates are critical to the acceptance of decision support systems in the medical community. This challenging task is typically treated as a simple binary classification, ignoring temporal dependencies between samples, whereas we propose to exploit this structure. We first introduce a common theoretical framework unifying dynamic survival analysis and early event prediction. Following an analysis of objectives from both fields, we propose Temporal Label Smoothing (TLS), a simpler, yet best-performing method that preserves prediction monotonicity over time. By focusing the objective on areas with a stronger predictive signal, TLS improves performance over all baselines on two large-scale benchmark tasks. Gains are particularly notable along clinically relevant measures, such as event recall at low false-alarm rates. TLS reduces the number of missed events by up to a factor of two over previously used approaches in early event prediction.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

HiRID-ICU-Benchmark --- A Comprehensive Machine Learning Benchmark on High-resolution ICU Data

  • Hugo Yèche
  • Rita Kuznetsova
  • Marc Zimmermann
  • Matthias Hüser
  • Xinrui Lyu
  • Martin Faltys
  • Gunnar Rätsch

The recent success of machine learning methods applied to time series collected from Intensive Care Units (ICU) exposes the lack of standardized machine learning benchmarks for developing and comparing such methods. While raw datasets, such as MIMIC-IV or eICU, can be freely accessed on Physionet, the choice of tasks and pre-processing is often chosen ad-hoc for each publication, limiting comparability across publications. In this work, we aim to improve this situation by providing a benchmark covering a large spectrum of ICU-related tasks. Using the HiRID dataset, we define multiple clinically relevant tasks developed in collaboration with clinicians. In addition, we provide a reproducible end-to-end pipeline to construct both data and labels. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis of current state-of-the-art sequence modeling methods, highlighting some limitations of deep learning approaches for this type of data. With this benchmark, we hope to give the research community the possibility of a fair comparison of their work.

ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Neighborhood Contrastive Learning Applied to Online Patient Monitoring

  • Hugo Yèche
  • Gideon Dresdner
  • Francesco Locatello
  • Matthias Hüser
  • Gunnar Rätsch

Intensive care units (ICU) are increasingly looking towards machine learning for methods to provide online monitoring of critically ill patients. In machine learning, online monitoring is often formulated as a supervised learning problem. Recently, contrastive learning approaches have demonstrated promising improvements over competitive supervised benchmarks. These methods rely on well-understood data augmentation techniques developed for image data which do not apply to online monitoring. In this work, we overcome this limitation by supplementing time-series data augmentation techniques with a novel contrastive learning objective which we call neighborhood contrastive learning (NCL). Our objective explicitly groups together contiguous time segments from each patient while maintaining state-specific information. Our experiments demonstrate a marked improvement over existing work applying contrastive methods to medical time-series.

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