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If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal discovery can help inferring properties of the `unobserved joint distributions'…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-12 Dominik Janzing , Philipp M. Faller , Leena Chennuru Vankadara

Conventional methods in causal effect inferencetypically rely on specifying a valid set of control variables. When this set is unknown or misspecified, inferences will be erroneous. We propose a method for inferring average causal effects…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-14 Ludvig Hult , Dave Zachariah

We propose an efficient method to estimate the accuracy of classifiers using only unlabeled data. We consider a setting with multiple classification problems where the target classes may be tied together through logical constraints. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-22 Emmanouil A. Platanios , Hoifung Poon , Tom M. Mitchell , Eric Horvitz

Researchers are often interested in learning not only the effect of treatments on outcomes, but also the pathways through which these effects operate. A mediator is a variable that is affected by treatment and subsequently affects outcome.…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-22 Jeremiah Jones , Ashkan Ertefaie , Robert L. Strawderman

This paper introduces tools for assessing the sensitivity, to unobserved confounding, of a common estimator of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome that employs weights: the weighted linear regression of the outcome on the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-06 Leonard Wainstein , Chad Hazlett

Prior knowledge and symbolic rules in machine learning are often expressed in the form of label constraints, especially in structured prediction problems. In this work, we compare two common strategies for encoding label constraints in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Kaifu Wang , Hangfeng He , Tin D. Nguyen , Piyush Kumar , Dan Roth

Overconfidence and underconfidence in machine learning classifiers is measured by calibration: the degree to which the probabilities predicted for each class match the accuracy of the classifier on that prediction. How one measures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Jeremy Nixon , Mike Dusenberry , Ghassen Jerfel , Timothy Nguyen , Jeremiah Liu , Linchuan Zhang , Dustin Tran

I argue that regularizing terms in standard regression methods not only help against overfitting finite data, but sometimes also yield better causal models in the infinite sample regime. I first consider a multi-dimensional variable…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-01 Dominik Janzing

Randomized experiments have long been the gold standard for scientists seeking to learn about cause and effect. When randomized experiments are infeasible, scientists often resort to observational studies, which are widely available and…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-13 Bohan Wu , Sebastian Salazar , Donald P. Green , David M. Blei

The study of model bias and variance with respect to decision boundaries is critically important in supervised classification. There is generally a tradeoff between the two, as fine-tuning of the decision boundary of a classification model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Matthew Almeida , Wei Ding , Scott Crouter , Ping Chen

Statistical learning on biological data can be challenging due to confounding variables in sample collection and processing. Confounders can cause models to generalize poorly and result in inaccurate prediction performance metrics if models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-13 Tzu-Yu Liu , Ajay Kannan , Adam Drake , Marvin Bertin , Nathan Wan

We study identification in nonparametric regression models with a misclassified and endogenous binary regressor when an instrument is correlated with misclassification error. We show that the regression function is nonparametrically…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-08-31 Hiroyuki Kasahara , Katsumi Shimotsu

For many applications of probabilistic classifiers it is important that the predicted confidence vectors reflect true probabilities (one says that the classifier is calibrated). It has been shown that common models fail to satisfy this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-10 Michael Panchenko , Anes Benmerzoug , Miguel de Benito Delgado

In strategic classification, an institution (e.g., a bank) anticipates adaptation from users who change their features to increase utility in a classification task (e.g., loan repayment). Since a key challenge is the distribution shift…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Antonio Gois , Sophia Gunluk , Nir Rosenfeld , Nidhi Hegde , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Dhanya Sridhar

Recommendation systems aim to predict users' feedback on items not exposed to them. Confounding bias arises due to the presence of unmeasured variables (e.g., the socio-economic status of a user) that can affect both a user's exposure and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Qing Zhang , Xiaoying Zhang , Yang Liu , Hongning Wang , Min Gao , Jiheng Zhang , Ruocheng Guo

For classification problems with significant class imbalance, subsampling can reduce computational costs at the price of inflated variance in estimating model parameters. We propose a method for subsampling efficiently for logistic…

Computation · Statistics 2014-09-24 William Fithian , Trevor Hastie

A major challenge in estimating treatment effects in observational studies is the reliance on untestable conditions such as the assumption of no unmeasured confounding. In this work, we propose an algorithm that can falsify the assumption…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-03 Rickard K. A. Karlsson , Jesse H. Krijthe

Class imbalance in real-world data poses a common bottleneck for machine learning tasks, since achieving good generalization on under-represented examples is often challenging. Mitigation strategies, such as under or oversampling the data…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-02-03 Emanuele Loffredo , Mauro Pastore , Simona Cocco , Rémi Monasson

Classifier predictions often rely on the assumption that new observations come from the same distribution as training data. When the underlying distribution changes, so does the optimal classification rule, and performance may degrade. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-01 Ciaran Evans , Max G'Sell

A common approach in positive-unlabeled learning is to train a classification model between labeled and unlabeled data. This strategy is in fact known to give an optimal classifier under mild conditions; however, it results in biased…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-03 Shantanu Jain , Martha White , Predrag Radivojac