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There is a trend to consider counterfactuals as invariably time-asymmetric. Recently, this trend manifested itself in the controversy about validity of counterfactual application of a time-symmetric quantum probability rule. Kastner (2003)…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2014-01-27 Lev Vaidman

Suppose you are told that taking a statin will reduce your risk of a heart attack or stroke by 3% in the next ten years, or that women have better emotional intelligence than men. You may wonder how accurate the 3% is, or how confident we…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2018-03-19 Michael Wood

Easier access to the internet and social media has made disseminating information through online sources very easy. Sources like Facebook, Twitter, online news sites and personal blogs of self-proclaimed journalists have become significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Shaily Bhatt , Sakshi Kalra , Naman Goenka , Yashvardhan Sharma

Contemporary approaches to assisted scientific discovery use language models to automatically generate large numbers of potential hypothesis to test, while also automatically generating code-based experiments to test those hypotheses. While…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Peter Jansen , Samiah Hassan , Ruoyao Wang

Counterfactual explanations (CEs) offer interpretable insights into machine learning predictions by answering ``what if?" questions. However, in real-world settings where models are frequently updated, existing counterfactual explanations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jamie Duell , Xiuyi Fan

Counterfactual explanations provide a potentially significant solution to the Explainable AI (XAI) problem, but good, native counterfactuals have been shown to rarely occur in most datasets. Hence, the most popular methods generate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Barry Smyth , Mark T Keane

With the help of online tools, unscrupulous authors can today generate a pseudo-scientific article and attempt to publish it. Some of these tools work by replacing or paraphrasing existing texts to produce new content, but they have a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Puthineath Lay , Martin Lentschat , Cyril Labbé

Counterfactual decision-making in the face of uncertainty involves selecting the optimal action from several alternatives using causal reasoning. Decision-makers often rank expected potential outcomes (or their corresponding utility and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Yuta Kawakami , Jin Tian

We describe the principles of counterfactual thinking in providing more precise definitions of causal effects and some of the implications of this work for the way in which causal questions in life course research are framed and evidence…

Applications · Statistics 2021-05-18 Bianca De Stavola , Moritz Herle , Andrew Pickles

Counterfactual reasoning is a foundational topic in both philosophical and logical studies \cite{Stalnaker1968-STAATO-5, Lewis1973-LEWC-2}. A pivotal component of counterfactual analysis is the concept of similarity between possible worlds…

Logic · Mathematics 2025-08-19 Marta Esteves

Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-15 Samuel A. Barnett , Thomas L. Griffiths , Robert D. Hawkins

Post-hoc explanations of machine learning models are crucial for people to understand and act on algorithmic predictions. An intriguing class of explanations is through counterfactuals, hypothetical examples that show people how to obtain a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal , Amit Sharma , Chenhao Tan

In science and medicine, model interpretations may be reported as discoveries of natural phenomena or used to guide patient treatments. In such high-stakes tasks, false discoveries may lead investigators astray. These applications would…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-18 Collin Burns , Jesse Thomason , Wesley Tansey

Statistical hypotheses are translations of scientific hypotheses into statements about one or more distributions, often concerning their centre. Tests that assess statistical hypotheses of centre implicitly assume a specific centre, e.g.,…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-21 Ryan Thompson , Catherine S. Forbes , Steven N. MacEachern , Mario Peruggia

Much of science is (rightly or wrongly) driven by hypothesis testing. Even in situations where the hypothesis testing paradigm is correct, the common practice of basing inferences solely on p-values has been under intense criticism for over…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-12-31 M. J. Bayarri , Daniel J. Benjamin , James O. Berger , Thomas M. Sellke

We report an inconsistency found in probability theory (also referred to as measure-theoretic probability). For probability measures induced by real-valued random variables, we deduce an "equality" such that one side of the "equality" is a…

General Mathematics · Mathematics 2017-03-01 Guang-Liang Li , Victor O. K. Li

I argue that John Norton's notions of empirical, hypothetical, and counterfactual possibility can be successfully used to analyze counterintuitive examples of physical possibility and align better with modal intuitions of practicing…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2025-03-07 Balazs Gyenis

There are various approaches to the problem of how one is supposed to conduct a statistical analysis. Different analyses can lead to contradictory conclusions in some problems so this is not a satisfactory state of affairs. It seems that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-06-25 Michael Evans

Counterfactuals have been recognized as an effective approach to explain classifier decisions. Nevertheless, they have not yet been considered in the context of clustering. In this work, we propose the use of counterfactuals to explain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Georgios Vardakas , Antonia Karra , Evaggelia Pitoura , Aristidis Likas

We recently reported evidence that large language models are capable of solving a wide range of text-based analogy problems in a zero-shot manner, indicating the presence of an emergent capacity for analogical reasoning. Two recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Taylor Webb , Keith J. Holyoak , Hongjing Lu