Related papers: Can you Trust the Trend: Discovering Simpson's Par…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
We describe a data-driven discovery method that leverages Simpson's paradox to uncover interesting patterns in behavioral data. Our method systematically disaggregates data to identify subgroups within a population whose behavior deviates…
Simpson's paradox, a long-standing statistical phenomenon, describes the reversal of an observed association when data are disaggregated into sub-populations. It has critical implications across statistics, epidemiology, economics, and…
Simpson's paradox and collapsibility are two closely related concepts in the context of data analysis. While the knowledge about the occurrence of Simpson's paradox helps a statistician to draw correct and meaningful conclusions, the…
Given two sets of data which lead to a similar statistical conclusion, the Simpson Paradox describes the tactic of combining these two sets and achieving the opposite conclusion. Depending upon the given data, this may or may not succeed.…
Recommendation systems are often evaluated based on user's interactions that were collected from an existing, already deployed recommendation system. In this situation, users only provide feedback on the exposed items and they may not leave…
There has been a flurry of research in recent years on notions of fairness in ranking and recommender systems, particularly on how to evaluate if a recommender allocates exposure equally across groups of relevant items (also known as…
Real-world observational datasets and machine learning have revolutionized data-driven decision-making, yet many models rely on empirical associations that may be misleading due to confounding and subgroup heterogeneity. Simpson's paradox…
The occurrence of Simpson's paradox (SP) in $2\times 2$ contingency tables has been well studied. The present work comprehensively revisits this problem using a combination of philosophical reflections, causal considerations, and…
Well known Simpson's paradox is puzzling and surprising for many, especially for the empirical researchers and users of statistics. However there is no surprise as far as mathematical details are concerned. A lot more is written about the…
The primary objective of this paper is to revisit Simpson's paradox using a statistical misspecification perspective. It is argued that the reversal of statistical associations is sometimes spurious, stemming from invalid probabilistic…
How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its…
Complex contagions describe systems where the probability or rate of contagious transmission is a nonlinear function of the exposure to contagious agents. These models were first studied theoretically but have since been used to capture…
Most people consider their friends to be more positive than themselves, exhibiting a Sentiment Paradox. Psychology research attributes this paradox to human cognition bias. With the goal to understand this phenomenon, we study sentiment…
Behavioral curve modeling -- fitting parametric functions to engagement-versus-exposure data -- is standard practice in recommendation, advertising, and clinical dosing. We show that aggregation introduces a systematic distortion: Simpson's…
Simpson's Paradox is a well-known phenomenon in statistical science, where the relationship between the response variable $X$ and a certain explanatory factor of interest $A$ reverses when an additional factor $B_1$ is considered. This…
We explore "omitted label contexts," in which training data is limited to a subset of the possible labels. This setting is standard among specialized human experts or specific, focused studies. By studying Simpson's paradox, we observe that…
Online communities provide a fertile ground for analyzing people's behavior and improving our understanding of social processes. Because both people and communities change over time, we argue that analyses of these communities that take…
We analyze the mixing properties of growing networks and find that, in some cases, the assortativity patterns are reversed once links' direction is considered: the disassortative behavior observed in such networks is a spurious effect, and…
The belief that numbers offer a single, objective description of reality overlooks a crucial truth: data does not speak for itself. Every dataset results from choices-what to measure, how, when, and with whom-which inevitably reflect…