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While the estimation of risk is an important question in the daily business of banking and insurance, many existing plug-in estimation procedures suffer from an unnecessary bias. This often leads to the underestimation of risk and…
Pressure for higher productivity and faster delivery is increasingly pervading software organizations. This can lead software engineers to act like chess players playing a gambit -- making sacrifices of their technically sound estimates,…
In certain applications involving the solution of a Bayesian inverse problem, it may not be possible or desirable to evaluate the full posterior, e.g. due to the high computational cost of doing so. This problem motivates the use of…
Software cost estimation is one of the prerequisite managerial activities carried out at the software development initiation stages and also repeated throughout the whole software life-cycle so that amendments to the total cost are made. In…
Almost all fields of science rely upon statistical inference to estimate unknown parameters in theoretical and computational models. While the performance of modern computer hardware continues to grow, the computational requirements for the…
Standard estimators in information provision experiments place more weight on individuals who update their beliefs more in response to new information. This paper shows that, in practice, these individuals who update the most have the…
We provide a theoretical framework to understand how widely used measures of choice difficulty relate. In a binary-option Bayesian expected-utility framework, we show that three measures of difficulty, (i) understanding (ex-ante value),…
In observational studies, instrumental variables estimation is greatly utilized to identify causal effects. One of the key conditions for the instrumental variables estimator to be consistent is the exclusion restriction, which indicates…
Empirical Software Engineering has received much attention in recent years and became a de-facto standard for scientific practice in Software Engineering. However, while extensive guidelines are nowadays available for designing, conducting,…
The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and…
Consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of some attribute of a text document; for example: what effect does writing a polite vs. rude email have on response time? To estimate a causal effect from observational data, we need to…
High complexity models are notorious in machine learning for overfitting, a phenomenon in which models well represent data but fail to generalize an underlying data generating process. A typical procedure for circumventing overfitting…
Recent theoretical work in causal inference has explored an important class of variables which, when conditioned on, may further amplify existing unmeasured confounding bias (bias amplification). Despite this theoretical work, existing…
When eliciting opinions from a group of experts, traditional devices used to promote honest reporting assume that there is an observable future outcome. In practice, however, this assumption is not always reasonable. In this paper, we…
While the {estimation} of risk is an important question in the daily business of banking and insurance, many existing plug-in estimation procedures suffer from an unnecessary bias. This often leads to the underestimation of risk and…
Fatigue strength estimation is a costly manual material characterization process in which state-of-the-art approaches follow a standardized experiment and analysis procedure. In this paper, we examine a modular, Machine Learning-based…
Empirical software engineering has received much attention in recent years and coined the shift from a more design-science-driven engineering discipline to an insight-oriented, and theory-centric one. Yet, we still face many challenges,…
Software development effort estimation is one of the most major activities in software project management. A number of models have been proposed to construct a relationship between software size and effort; however we still have problems…
Bayesian optimization is a powerful global optimization technique for expensive black-box functions. One of its shortcomings is that it requires auxiliary optimization of an acquisition function at each iteration. This auxiliary…
The measurement of the efficiency of an event selection is always an important part of the analysis of experimental data. The statistical techniques which are needed to determine the efficiency and its uncertainty are reviewed. Frequentist…