Related papers: Beware the Normative Fallacy
Deductive verification is an effective method to ensure that a given system exposes the intended behavior. In spite of its proven usefulness and feasibility in selected projects, deductive verification is still not a mainstream technique.…
How should researchers analyze randomized experiments in which the main outcome is latent and measured in multiple ways but each measure contains some degree of error? We first identify a critical study-specific noncomparability problem in…
When applicants get rejected by an algorithmic decision system, recourse explanations provide actionable suggestions for how to change their input features to get a positive evaluation. A crucial yet overlooked phenomenon is that recourse…
A data science task can be deemed as making sense of the data or testing a hypothesis about it. The conclusions inferred from data can greatly guide us to make informative decisions. Big data has enabled us to carry out countless prediction…
AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act…
Stochastic processes offer a flexible mathematical formalism to model and reason about systems. Most analysis tools, however, start from the premises that models are fully specified, so that any parameters controlling the system's dynamics…
In the science of emotion, it is widely assumed that folk emotion categories form a biological and psychological typology, and studies are routinely designed and analyzed to identify emotion-specific patterns. This approach shapes the…
Experiments deliver credible treatment-effect estimates but, because they are costly, are often restricted to specific sites, small populations, or particular mechanisms. A common practice across several fields is therefore to combine…
In two recent papers, I have proposed a description of decision analysis that differs from the Bayesian picture painted by Savage, Jeffrey and other classic authors. Response to this view has been either overly enthusiastic or unduly…
In symbolic regression, the search for analytic models is typically driven purely by the prediction error observed on the training data samples. However, when the data samples do not sufficiently cover the input space, the prediction error…
Recent research revealed a considerable lack of reliability for user feedback when interacting with adaptive systems, often denoted as user noise or human uncertainty. Moreover, this lack of reliability holds striking impacts for the…
Significant challenges exist globally regarding literacy teaching and learning. To address these challenges, key features of how the brain works should be taken into account. First, perception is an active process based in detection of…
This paper tackles the challenge of detecting unreliable behavior in regression algorithms, which may arise from intrinsic variability (e.g., aleatoric uncertainty) or modeling errors (e.g., model uncertainty). First, we formally introduce…
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
The rapid deployment of Large Language Models and AI agents across critical societal and technical domains is hindered by persistent behavioral pathologies including sycophancy, hallucination, and strategic deception that resist mitigation…
Over the past two decades, considerable strides have been made in advancing neuroscientific techniques, yet challenges remain in attributing causality to observed associations. This review addresses a fundamental issue in observational…
The sudden appearance of modern machine learning (ML) phenomena like double descent and benign overfitting may leave many classically trained statisticians feeling uneasy -- these phenomena appear to go against the very core of statistical…
In a regression context, when the relevant subset of explanatory variables is uncertain, it is common to use a data-driven model selection procedure. Classical linear model theory, applied naively to the selected sub-model, may not be valid…
It is widely believed that theory is useful in physics because it describes simple systems and that strictly empirical phenomenological approaches are necessary for complex biological and social systems. Here we prove based upon an analysis…
Representation learning constructs low-dimensional representations to summarize essential features of high-dimensional data. This learning problem is often approached by describing various desiderata associated with learned representations;…