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Frequently, empirical studies are plagued with missing data. When the data are missing not at random, the parameter of interest is not identifiable in general. Without additional assumptions, we can derive bounds of the parameters of…
Prevalence mapping in low resource settings is an increasingly important endeavor to guide policy making and to spatially and temporally characterize the burden of disease. We will focus our discussion on consideration of the complex design…
Bayesian spatial modeling of heavy-tailed distributions has become increasingly popular in various areas of science in recent decades. We propose a Weibull regression model with spatial random effects for analyzing extreme economic loss.…
Bayesian multinomial logistic regression provides a principled, interpretable approach to multiclass classification, but posterior sampling becomes increasingly expensive as the model dimension grows. Prior work has studied scalability in…
The gamma distribution arises frequently in Bayesian models, but there is not an easy-to-use conjugate prior for the shape parameter of a gamma. This inconvenience is usually dealt with by using either Metropolis-Hastings moves, rejection…
We describe a method to identify poor households in data-scarce countries by leveraging information contained in nationally representative household surveys. It employs standard statistical learning techniques---cross-validation and…
Improving health in the most disadvantaged populations requires reliable estimates of health and demographic indicators to inform policy and interventions. Low- and middle-income countries with the largest burden of disease and disability…
This study leverages spatial machine learning (SML) to enhance the accuracy of Proxy Means Testing (PMT) for poverty targeting in Indonesia. Conventional PMT methodologies are prone to exclusion and inclusion errors due to their inability…
Objectives: Our research adopts computational techniques to analyze disease outbreaks weekly over a large geographic area while maintaining local-level analysis by incorporating relevant high-spatial resolution cultural and environmental…
Debates about whether development projects improve living conditions persist, partly because observational estimates can be biased by incomplete adjustment and because reliable outcome data are scarce at the neighborhood level. We address…
Random allocation models used in clinical trials aid researchers in determining which of a particular treatment provides the best results by reducing bias between groups. Often however, this determination leaves researchers battling ethical…
Bayesian analysis is widely used in science and engineering for real-time forecasting, decision making, and to help unravel the processes that explain the observed data. These data are some deterministic and/or stochastic transformations of…
Global data association is an essential prerequisite for robot operation in environments seen at different times or by different robots. Repetitive or symmetric data creates significant challenges for existing methods, which typically rely…
Homelessness is a humanitarian challenge affecting an estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide. In the face of rising homeless populations in developed nations and a strain on social services, government agencies are increasingly adopting…
In many developing countries, half the population lives in rural locations, where access to essentials such as school materials, mosquito nets, and medical supplies is restricted. We propose an alternative method of distribution (to…
Diffusion models, which leverage stochastic processes to capture complex data distributions effectively, have shown their performance as generative models, achieving notable success in image-related tasks through iterative denoising…
Access to accurate, granular, and up-to-date poverty data is essential for humanitarian organizations to identify vulnerable areas for poverty alleviation efforts. Recent works have shown success in combining computer vision and satellite…
The study of international relations by definition deals with interdependencies among countries. One form of interdependence between countries is the diffusion of country-level features, such as policies, political regimes, or conflict. In…
Distribution shifts are ubiquitous in real-world machine learning applications, posing a challenge to the generalization of models trained on one data distribution to another. We focus on scenarios where data distributions vary across…
Equipping current decision-making tools with notions of fairness, equitability, or other ethically motivated outcomes, is one of the top priorities in recent research efforts in machine learning, AI, and optimization. In this paper, we…