Related papers: Second-order Inductive Inference: an axiomatic app…
Inferring causal structure poses a combinatorial search problem that typically involves evaluating structures with a score or independence test. The resulting search is costly, and designing suitable scores or tests that capture prior…
We introduce a graceful approach to probabilistic inference called bounded conditioning. Bounded conditioning monotonically refines the bounds on posterior probabilities in a belief network with computation, and converges on final…
Observations on the past provide some hints about what will happen in the future, and this can be quantified using information theory. The ``predictive information'' defined in this way has connections to measures of complexity that have…
With the explosive growth of accessible information, expecially on the Internet, evaluation-based filtering has become a crucial task. Various systems have been devised aiming to sort through large volumes of information and select what is…
We introduce OpportunityFinder, a code-less framework for performing a variety of causal inference studies with panel data for non-expert users. In its current state, OpportunityFinder only requires users to provide raw observational data…
After surveying classical results, we introduce a generalized notion of inference system to support structural recursion on non-well-founded data types. Besides axioms and inference rules with the usual meaning, a generalized inference…
Preference Inference involves inferring additional user preferences from elicited or observed preferences, based on assumptions regarding the form of the user's preference relation. In this paper we consider a situation in which…
It is well known that accurate probabilistic predictors can be trained through empirical risk minimisation with proper scoring rules as loss functions. While such learners capture so-called aleatoric uncertainty of predictions, various…
Given an undirected graph representing similarities between a set of items and an additive measure evaluating the items, we treat the position of a special subset of items in an ordinal ranking through a collection of combinatorial…
Motivated by the goals of dataset pruning and defect identification, a growing body of methods have been developed to score individual examples within a dataset. These methods, which we call "example difficulty scores", are typically used…
Societal biases that are contained in retrieved documents have received increased interest. Such biases, which are often prevalent in the training data and learned by the model, can cause societal harms, by misrepresenting certain groups,…
Bayesian inference requires specification of a single, precise prior distribution, whereas frequentist inference only accommodates a vacuous prior. Since virtually every real-world application falls somewhere in between these two extremes,…
In this paper the elicitation of probabilities from human experts is considered as a measurement process, which may be disturbed by random 'measurement noise'. Using Bayesian concepts a second order probability distribution is derived…
We present two algorithms for exact and approximate inference in causal networks. The first algorithm, dynamic conditioning, is a refinement of cutset conditioning that has linear complexity on some networks for which cutset conditioning is…
Stability selection is a versatile framework for structure estimation and variable selection in high-dimensional setting, primarily grounded in frequentist principles. In this paper, we propose an enhanced methodology that integrates…
In this paper, an Eliteness Hypothesis for information retrieval is proposed, where we define two generative processes to create information items and queries. By assuming the deterministic relationships between the eliteness of terms and…
Ranking problems, also known as preference learning problems, define a widely spread class of statistical learning problems with many applications, including fraud detection, document ranking, medicine, credit risk screening, image ranking…
According to the probability ranking principle, the document set with the highest values of probability of relevance optimizes information retrieval effectiveness given the probabilities are estimated as accurately as possible. The key…
We can overcome uncertainty with uncertainty. Using randomness in our choices and in what we control, and hence in the decision making process, could potentially offset the uncertainty inherent in the environment and yield better outcomes.…
Neural ranking models have shown outstanding performance across a variety of tasks, such as document retrieval, re-ranking, question answering and conversational retrieval. However, the inner decision process of these models remains largely…