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Because of the widespread use of black box prediction methods such as random forests and neural nets, there is renewed interest in developing methods for quantifying variable importance as part of the broader goal of interpretable…
Psychological research often focuses on examining group differences in a set of numeric variables for which normality is doubtful. Longitudinal studies enable the investigation of developmental trends. For instance, a recent study…
Variance based global sensitivity analysis measures the relevance of inputs to a single output using Sobol' indices. This paper extends the definition in a natural way to multiple outputs, directly measuring the relevance of inputs to the…
The default variable-importance measure in random Forests, Gini importance, has been shown to suffer from the bias of the underlying Gini-gain splitting criterion. While the alternative permutation importance is generally accepted as a…
In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…
We describe a novel attribution method which is grounded in Sensitivity Analysis and uses Sobol indices. Beyond modeling the individual contributions of image regions, Sobol indices provide an efficient way to capture higher-order…
We present a novel method for quantifying dependencies in multivariate datasets, based on estimating the R\'{e}nyi entropy by minimum spanning trees (MSTs). The length of the MSTs can be used to order pairs of variables from strongly to…
When the individual studies assembled for a meta-analysis report means ($\mu_C$, $\mu_T$) for their treatment (T) and control (C) arms, but those data are on different scales or come from different instruments, the customary measure of…
Sensitivity analysis (SA) is an important aspect of process automation. It often aims to identify the process inputs that influence the process output's variance significantly. Existing SA approaches typically consider the input-output…
We propose a new sufficient dimension reduction approach designed deliberately for high-dimensional classification. This novel method is named maximal mean variance (MMV), inspired by the mean variance index first proposed by Cui, Li and…
Covariate shifts are a common problem in predictive modeling on real-world problems. This paper proposes addressing the covariate shift problem by minimizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) statistics between the training and test sets in…
This paper studies the problem of data collection for policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In policy evaluation, we are given a target policy and asked to estimate the expected cumulative reward it will obtain in an…
Time-varying covariates are often available in survival studies and estimation of the hazard function needs to be updated as new information becomes available. In this paper, we investigate several different easy-to-implement ways that…
Independence analysis is an indispensable step before regression analysis to find out essential factors that influence the objects. With many applications in machine Learning, medical Learning and a variety of disciplines, statistical…
Mendelian randomization (MR) is a widely-used method to estimate the causal relationship between a risk factor and disease. A fundamental part of any MR analysis is to choose appropriate genetic variants as instrumental variables.…
We discuss estimation and inference of conditional treatment effects in regression discontinuity (RD) designs with multiple scores. In addition to local linear regressions and the minimax-optimal estimator more recently proposed by Imbens…
Robust topology optimization (RTO) improves the robustness of designs with respect to random sources in real-world structures, yet an accurate sensitivity analysis requires the solution of many systems of equations at each optimization…
This paper studies the use of a machine learning-based estimator as a control variate for mitigating the variance of Monte Carlo sampling. Specifically, we seek to uncover the key factors that influence the efficiency of control variates in…
Robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are receiving much attention in learning a robust policy which is less sensitive to environment changes. There are an increasing number of works analyzing sample-efficiency of robust MDPs. However,…
A common approach for feature selection is to examine the variable importance scores for a machine learning model, as a way to understand which features are the most relevant for making predictions. Given the significance of feature…