Related papers: Lockdown effects in US states: an artificial count…
In online markets, agents often learn from other's actions in addition to their private information. Such observational learning can lead to herding or information cascades in which agents eventually ignore their private information and…
We recast the synthetic controls for evaluating policies as a counterfactual prediction problem and replace its linear regression with a nonparametric model inspired by machine learning. The proposed method enables us to achieve accurate…
Counterfactuals are widely used in AI to explain how minimal changes to a model's input can lead to a different output. However, established methods for computing counterfactuals typically focus on one-step decision-making, and are not…
We address the challenge of explaining counterfactual outcomes in multi-agent Markov decision processes. In particular, we aim to explain the total counterfactual effect of an agent's action on the outcome of a realized scenario through its…
Research has investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business performance and survival, indicating particularly adverse effects for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Yet only limited work has examined whether and how online…
The COVID-19 pandemic so far has caused huge negative impacts on different areas all over the world, and the United States (US) is one of the most affected countries. In this paper, we use methods from the functional data analysis to look…
For counterfactual policy evaluation, it is important to ensure that treatment parameters are relevant to policies in question. This is especially challenging under unobserved heterogeneity, as is well featured in the definition of the…
Given multiple new COVID-19 variants are continuously emerging, non-pharmaceutical interventions are still primary control strategies to curb the further spread of coronavirus. However, implementing strict interventions over extended…
The impact of mitigation or control measures on an epidemics can be estimated by fitting the parameters of a compartmental model to empirical data, and running the model forward with modified parameters that account for a specific measure.…
Autoregressive models are widely used for the analysis of time-series data, but they remain underutilized when estimating effects of interventions. This is in part due to endogeneity of the lagged outcome with any intervention of interest,…
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments had to rapidly implement lockdown policies that restricted human mobility to suppress the spread of the disease and reduce mortality. Because of the movement restrictions resulting from government…
The number of Covid-19 cases is increasing dramatically worldwide. Therefore, the availability of reliable forecasts for the number of cases in the coming days is of fundamental importance. We propose a simple statistical method for…
Tropical cyclones have always been a concern for public authorities in the U.S., with a season lasting nearly half of the year. Using longitudinal data on economic growth and exposure to tropical cyclones, we provide new comprehensive…
Methods to find counterfactual explanations have predominantly focused on one step decision making processes. In this work, we initiate the development of methods to find counterfactual explanations for decision making processes in which…
Can uncertainty about credit availability trigger a slowdown in real activity? This question is answered by using a novel method to identify shocks to uncertainty in access to credit. Time-variation in uncertainty about credit availability…
Regional quarantine policies, in which a portion of a population surrounding infections are locked down, are an important tool to contain disease. However, jurisdictional governments -- such as cities, counties, states, and countries -- act…
We study and predict the evolution of Covid-19 in six US states from the period May 1 through August 31 using a discrete compartment-based model and prescribe active intervention policies, like lockdowns, on the basis of minimizing a loss…
This paper repurposes the classic insight from network theory that long-distance connections drive disease propagation into a strategy for controlling a second wave of Covid-19. We simulate a scenario in which a lockdown is first imposed on…
It is shown that the outcomes of measurements on systems in separable mixed states can be partitioned, via subsequent measurements on a disentangled extraneous system, into subensembles that display the statistics of entangled states. This…
After the introduction of drastic containment measures aimed at stopping the epidemic contagion from SARS-CoV2, many governments have adopted a strategy based on a periodic relaxation of such measures in the face of a severe economic crisis…