Related papers: Block what you can, except when you shouldn't
We consider the problem of evaluating designs for a two-arm randomized experiment with the criterion being the power of the randomization test for the one-sided null hypothesis. Our evaluation assumes a response that is linear in one…
A common assumption in causal inference is that random treatment assignment ensures that potential outcomes are independent of treatment, or in one word, unconfoundedness. This paper highlights that randomization and unconfoundedness are…
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 study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…
We contemplate an experimental situation in a $2^k$-factorial experiment with acute resource crunch so that we need to conduct just a saturated design [SD] - with the understanding that precision of the estimates cannot be estimated from…
This paper focuses on block likelihood estimation for geostatistical data, a method that balances statistical accuracy and computational efficiency. Central to this approach is the choice of block size, which can significantly impact…
Judging scholarly posters creates a challenge to assign the judges efficiently. If there are many posters and few reviews per judge, the commonly used Balanced Incomplete Block Design is not a feasible option. An additional challenge is an…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
Novel reinforcement learning algorithms, or improvements on existing ones, are commonly justified by evaluating their performance on benchmark environments and are compared to an ever-changing set of standard algorithms. However, despite…
The literature on cluster-randomized trials typically allows for interference within but not across clusters. This may be implausible when units are irregularly distributed across space without well-separated communities, as clusters in…
Predictive algorithms inform consequential decisions in settings with selective labels: outcomes are observed only for units selected by past decision makers. This creates an identification problem under unobserved confounding -- when…
Causal inference is best understood using potential outcomes. This use is particularly important in more complex settings, that is, observational studies or randomized experiments with complications such as noncompliance. The topic of this…
Randomized trials balance all covariates on average and provide the gold standard for estimating treatment effects. Chance imbalances nevertheless exist more or less in realized treatment allocations and intrigue an important question: what…
The resource-consuming mining of blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol bears the risk of ruin, namely when the operational costs for the mining exceed the received rewards. In this paper we investigate to…
An important issue in concurrency is interference. This issue manifests itself in both shared-variable and communication-based concurrency --- this paper focusses on the former case where interference is caused by the environment of a…
Combinatorics, like computer science, often has to deal with large objects of unspecified (or unusable) structure. One powerful way to deal with such an arbitrary object is to decompose it into more usable components. In particular, it has…
Machine learning algorithms are increasingly influencing our decisions and interacting with us in all parts of our daily lives. Therefore, just like for power plants, highways, and myriad other engineered sociotechnical systems, we must…
For large classes of group testing problems, we derive lower bounds for the probability that all significant items are uniquely identified using specially constructed random designs. These bounds allow us to optimize parameters of the…
This paper extends the design-based framework to settings with multi-way cluster dependence, and shows how multi-way clustering can be justified when clustered assignment and clustered sampling occurs on different dimensions, or when either…
For paired comparison experiments involving competing options described by two-level attributes several different methods of constructing designs having block paired observations under the main effects model are presented. These designs are…