Related papers: Conservative statistical post-election audits
We introduce $\textit{Backward Conformal Prediction}$, a method that guarantees conformal coverage while providing flexible control over the size of prediction sets. Unlike standard conformal prediction, which fixes the coverage level and…
One central goal of design of observational studies is to embed non-experimental data into an approximate randomized controlled trial using statistical matching. Despite empirical researchers' best intention and effort to create…
Estimating prevalence, the fraction of a population with a certain medical condition, is fundamental to epidemiology. Traditional methods rely on classification of test samples taken at random from a population. Such approaches to…
In the traditional voting manipulation literature, it is assumed that a group of manipulators jointly misrepresent their preferences to get a certain candidate elected, while the remaining voters are truthful. In this paper, we depart from…
In the context of computational social choice, we study voting methods that assign a set of winners to each profile of voter preferences. A voting method satisfies the property of positive involvement (PI) if for any election in which a…
Win statistics have become increasingly popular for analyzing hierarchical composite endpoints in clinical trials, because they summarize treatment benefit through pairwise comparisons that respect the clinical importance order among…
We show how hidden interesting subelections can be discovered in ordinal elections. An interesting subelection consists of a reasonably large set of voters and a reasonably large set of candidates such that the former have a consistent…
In a Monte-Carlo test, the observed dataset is fixed, and several resampled or permuted versions of the dataset are generated in order to test a null hypothesis that the original dataset is exchangeable with the resampled/permuted ones.…
Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of…
Posterior predictive p-values are a common approach to Bayesian model-checking. This article analyses their frequency behaviour, that is, their distribution when the parameters and the data are drawn from the prior and the model…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
Left censoring can occur with relative frequency when analysing recurrent events in epidemiological studies, especially observational ones. Concretely, the inclusion of individuals that were already at risk before the effective initiation…
In prior work we have introduced an asymptotic threshold of sufficient randomness for causal inference from observational data. In this paper we extend that prior work in three main ways. First, we show how to empirically estimate a lower…
The Possible-Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the set of candidates is partially specified, whether a distinguished candidate can become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational…
The single transferable vote (STV) is a system of preferential proportional voting employed in multi-seat elections. Each ballot cast by a voter is a (potentially partial) ranking over a set of candidates. The margin of victory, or simply…
To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…
Clustering is part of unsupervised analysis methods that consist in grouping samples into homogeneous and separate subgroups of observations also called clusters. To interpret the clusters, statistical hypothesis testing is often used to…
This paper considers the problem of estimating the variance of a sum of a triangular array of random vectors with heterogeneous means. When random vectors exhibit two-way cluster dependence or weak dependence, standard variance estimators…
In statistical inference, confidence set procedures are typically evaluated based on their validity and width properties. Even when procedures achieve rate-optimal widths, confidence sets can still be excessively wide in practice due to…
We present a sequential testing method to identify a practically significant effect. We build on the existing mixture sequential probability ratio test (mSPRT) that can sequentially test for a non-zero treatment effect by using a truncated…