Related papers: Beware the Normative Fallacy
Should prediction models always deliver a prediction? In the pursuit of maximum predictive performance, critical considerations of reliability and fairness are often overshadowed, particularly when it comes to the role of uncertainty.…
Innovation is the direct intended product of certain styles in research, but not of others. Fundamental conflicts between descriptive vs inferential statistics, deductive vs inductive hypothesis testing, and exploratory vs pre-planned…
Unobserved confounding arises when an unmeasured feature influences both the treatment and the outcome, leading to biased causal effect estimates. This issue undermines observational studies in fields like economics, medicine, ecology or…
Comparative simulation studies are workhorse tools for benchmarking statistical methods. As with other empirical studies, the success of simulation studies hinges on the quality of their design, execution and reporting. If not conducted…
This paper analyzes the working or default assumptions researchers in the formal, statistical, and case study traditions typically hold regarding the sources of unexplained variance, the meaning of outliers, parameter values, human…
In reinforcement learning, we can learn a model of future observations and rewards, and use it to plan the agent's next actions. However, jointly modeling future observations can be computationally expensive or even intractable if the…
We design and implement lab experiments to evaluate the normative appeal of behavior arising from models of ambiguity-averse preferences. We report two main empirical findings. First, we demonstrate that behavior reflects an incomplete…
A meaningful and deep understanding of the human aspects of software engineering (SE) requires psychological constructs to be considered. Psychology theory can facilitate the systematic and sound development as well as the adoption of…
Data analyses are often constructed in an imperative manner, where commands representing actions taken on the data are issued sequentially. The publication of these commands, along with the data, is essential to the reproducibility of the…
Optimization is offered as an objective approach to resolving complex, real-world decisions involving uncertainty and conflicting interests. It drives business strategies as well as public policies and, increasingly, lies at the heart of…
Decision analysis deals with modeling and enhancing decision processes. A principal challenge in improving behavior is in obtaining a transparent description of existing behavior in the first place. In this paper, we develop an expressive,…
The ability to make decisions based on data, with its inherent uncertainties and variability, is a complex and vital skill in the modern world. The need for such quantitative critical thinking occurs in many different contexts, and while it…
Researchers are increasingly recognizing the importance of human aspects in software development. Since qualitative methods are used to explore human behavior in-depth, we believe that studies using such methods will become more common.…
Consequential decision-making incentivizes individuals to strategically adapt their behavior to the specifics of the decision rule. While a long line of work has viewed strategic adaptation as gaming and attempted to mitigate its effects,…
In model-based reinforcement learning, planning with an imperfect model of the environment has the potential to harm learning progress. But even when a model is imperfect, it may still contain information that is useful for planning. In…
The last decades saw dramatic progress in brain research. These advances were often buttressed by probing single variables to make circumscribed discoveries, typically through null hypothesis significance testing. New ways for generating…
Understanding and explaining the mistakes made by trained models is critical to many machine learning objectives, such as improving robustness, addressing concept drift, and mitigating biases. However, this is often an ad hoc process that…
Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural…
Network-based analyses of dynamical systems have become increasingly popular in climate science. Here we address network construction from a statistical perspective and highlight the often ignored fact that the calculated correlation values…
Business process deviance refers to the phenomenon whereby a subset of the executions of a business process deviate, in a negative or positive way, with respect to its expected or desirable outcomes. Deviant executions of a business process…