Related papers: Beware the Normative Fallacy
Decision-making with information displays is a key focus of research in areas like human-AI collaboration and data visualization. However, what constitutes a decision problem, and what is required for an experiment to conclude that…
Neural networks often learn to make predictions that overly rely on spurious correlation existing in the dataset, which causes the model to be biased. While previous work tackles this issue by using explicit labeling on the spuriously…
The study of associations and their causal explanations is a central research activity whose methodology varies tremendously across fields. Even within specialized subfields, comparisons across textbooks and journals reveals that the basics…
This paper studies how violations of structural assumptions like expected utility and exponential discounting can be connected to basic rationality violations, even though these assumptions are typically regarded as independent building…
One of the most crucial issues in data mining is to model human behaviour in order to provide personalisation, adaptation and recommendation. This usually involves implicit or explicit knowledge, either by observing user interactions, or by…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to significantly improve clinical decision making. However, treatment policies learned via RL from observational data are sensitive to subtle choices in study design. We highlight a simple…
In contemporary educational systems, academic performance indicators play a central role in institutional evaluation and in the interpretation of student trajectories. However, under conditions of rapid technological change, the inferential…
The use of causal language in observational studies has raised concerns about overstatement in scientific communication. While some argue that such language should be reserved for randomized controlled trials, others contend that rigorous…
Transformers have been shown to be able to perform deductive reasoning on a logical rulebase containing rules and statements written in English natural language. While the progress is promising, it is currently unclear if these models…
Quantitative practice across statistics, engineering, and machine learning has been transformed by the automation of inference. Predictions are produced, validated, and deployed at scale and speed that human-mediated reasoning could not…
A scientific reasoning system makes decisions using objective evidence in the form of independent experimental trials, propositional axioms, and constraints on the probabilities of events. As a first step towards this goal, we propose a…
RLHF assumes that annotation responses reflect genuine human preferences. We argue this assumption warrants systematic examination, and that behavioral science offers frameworks that bring clarity to when it holds and when it breaks down.…
The last decade has seen an upswing in interest and adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, in large part due to its demonstrated capabilities at performing certain tasks at "super-human levels". This has incentivized the…
Mathematical Theory of Evidence (MTE), a foundation for reasoning under partial ignorance, is blamed to leave frequencies outside (or aside of) its framework. The seriousness of this accusation is obvious: no experiment may be run to…
Dyadic research designs concern data that comprises interactions among actors. Dyadic approaches unambiguously constitute the most frequent designs employed in the empirical study of international politics, but what do such designs cary…
While mastered by some, good scientific writing practices within Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) research appear to be seldom discussed and documented. Despite this, these practices are implicit or even explicit evaluation criteria of…
When making choices in software projects, engineers and other stakeholders engage in decision making that involves uncertain future outcomes. Research in psychology, behavioral economics and neuroscience has questioned many of the classical…
We consider an analyst whose goal is to identify a subject's utility function through revealed preference analysis. We argue the analyst's preference about which experiments to run should adhere to three normative principles: The first,…
Data science has the potential to improve business in a variety of verticals. While the lion's share of data science projects uses a predictive approach, to drive improvements these predictions should become decisions. However, such a…
In this paper, we provide more evidence for the contention that logical consequence should be understood in normative terms. Hartry Field and John MacFarlane covered the classical case. We extend their work, examining what it means for an…