Related papers: The Search for Truth through Data: NP Decision Pro…
Information forms the basis for all human behavior, including the ubiquitous decision-making that people constantly perform in their every day lives. It is thus the mission of researchers to understand how humans process information to…
We consider a decision maker who must choose an action in order to maximize a reward function that depends also on an unknown parameter {\Theta}. The decision maker can delay taking the action in order to experiment and gather additional…
We introduce a game-theoretic framework to study the hypothesis testing problem, in the presence of an adversary aiming at preventing a correct decision. Specifically, the paper considers a scenario in which an analyst has to decide whether…
Several tasks in information retrieval (IR) rely on assumptions regarding the distribution of some property (such as term frequency) in the data being processed. This thesis argues that such distributional assumptions can lead to incorrect…
Statistical hypothesis testing serves as statistical evidence for scientific innovation. However, if the reported results are intentionally biased, hypothesis testing no longer controls the rate of false discovery. In particular, we study…
In almost every scientific field, an experiment involves collecting data and then analysing it. The analysis stage will often consist in trying to extract some physical parameter and estimating its uncertainty; this is known as Parameter…
The reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) play a critical role in many downstream tasks, yet depend strongly on the quality of training data. Despite various proposed data construction methods, their practical utility in…
This paper provides a statistical analysis of high-dimensional batch Reinforcement Learning (RL) using sparse linear function approximation. When there is a large number of candidate features, our result sheds light on the fact that…
After some general remarks about the interrelation between philosophical and statistical thinking, the discussion centres largely on significance tests. These are defined as the calculation of $p$-values rather than as formal procedures for…
We theoretically analyze the problem of testing for $p$-hacking based on distributions of $p$-values across multiple studies. We provide general results for when such distributions have testable restrictions (are non-increasing) under the…
The goal of this paper is to provide a theory linear regression based entirely on approximations. It will be argued that the standard linear regression model based theory whether frequentist or Bayesian has failed and that this failure is…
This article introduces both a new algorithm for reconstructing epsilon-machines from data, as well as the decisional states. These are defined as the internal states of a system that lead to the same decision, based on a user-provided…
We consider the problem of multiple hypothesis testing with generic side information: for each hypothesis $H_i$ we observe both a p-value $p_i$ and some predictor $x_i$ encoding contextual information about the hypothesis. For large-scale…
Sequential learning models situations where agents predict a ground truth in sequence, by using their private, noisy measurements, and the predictions of agents who came earlier in the sequence. We study sequential learning in a social…
We consider the problem of purchasing data for machine learning or statistical estimation. The data analyst has a budget to purchase datasets from multiple data providers. She does not have any test data that can be used to evaluate the…
Extending the intelligence of sensors to the data-acquisition process - deciding whether to sample or not - can result in transformative energy-efficiency gains. However, making such a decision in a deterministic manner involves risk of…
Background: Confirmation bias is the tendency to acquire or evaluate new information in a way that is consistent with one's preexisting beliefs. It is omnipresent in psychology, economics, and even scientific practices. Prior theoretical…
Developing state-of-the-art approaches for specific tasks is a major driving force in our research community. Depending on the prestige of the task, publishing it can come along with a lot of visibility. The question arises how reliable are…
Statistical methods are indispensable to scientific inference. However, there exists a longstanding tension across a wide range of scientific disciplines about the role that ``context'' should play in the application of statistical methods…
Text retrieval plays a crucial role in incorporating factual knowledge for decision making into language processing pipelines, ranging from chat-based web search to question answering systems. Current state-of-the-art text retrieval models…