Related papers: Statistical quantification of confounding bias in …
Confounding variables are a well known source of nuisance in biomedical studies. They present an even greater challenge when we combine them with black-box machine learning techniques that operate on raw data. This work presents two case…
We develop a systematic, omnibus approach to goodness-of-fit testing for parametric distributional models when the variable of interest is only partially observed due to censoring and/or truncation. In many such designs, tests based on the…
Recently, Saeb et al (2017) showed that, in diagnostic machine learning applications, having data of each subject randomly assigned to both training and test sets (record-wise data split) can lead to massive underestimation of the…
To unbiasedly estimate a causal effect on an outcome unconfoundedness is often assumed. If there is sufficient knowledge on the underlying causal structure then existing confounder selection criteria can be used to select subsets of the…
The desire to train complex machine learning algorithms and to increase the statistical power in association studies drives neuroimaging research to use ever-larger datasets. The most obvious way to increase sample size is by pooling scans…
Confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret information in a way that aligns with one's preconceptions, can profoundly impact scientific research, leading to conclusions that reflect the researcher's hypotheses even when the observational…
Machine learning models are central to people's lives and impact society in ways as fundamental as determining how people access information. The gravity of these models imparts a responsibility to model developers to ensure that they are…
Observational data is increasingly used as a means for making individual-level causal predictions and intervention recommendations. The foremost challenge of causal inference from observational data is hidden confounding, whose presence…
Statistical modeling plays a fundamental role in understanding the underlying mechanism of massive data (statistical inference) and predicting the future (statistical prediction). Although all models are wrong, researchers try their best to…
Causal inference necessarily relies upon untestable assumptions; hence, it is crucial to assess the robustness of obtained results to violations of identification assumptions. However, such sensitivity analysis is only occasionally…
Statistical methods are based on model assumptions, and it is statistical folklore that a method's model assumptions should be checked before applying it. This can be formally done by running one or more misspecification tests of model…
Marginal structural models are a popular tool for investigating the effects of time-varying treatments, but they require an assumption of no unobserved confounders between the treatment and outcome. With observational data, this assumption…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
Commonsense reasoning is intuitive for humans but has been a long-term challenge for artificial intelligence (AI). Recent advancements in pretrained language models have shown promising results on several commonsense benchmark datasets.…
Most supervised machine learning tasks are subject to irreducible prediction errors. Probabilistic predictive models address this limitation by providing probability distributions that represent a belief over plausible targets, rather than…
In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis testing problem that checks whether part of covariates / confounders significantly affect the heterogeneous treatment effect given all covariates. This model checking is particularly useful in…
Parametric Bayesian modeling offers a powerful and flexible toolbox for machine learning. Yet the model, however detailed, may still be wrong, and this can make inferences untrustworthy. In this paper we introduce a new class of…
Several problems in statistics involve the combination of high-variance unbiased estimators with low-variance estimators that are only unbiased under strong assumptions. A notable example is the estimation of causal effects while combining…
Many applications of computational social science aim to infer causal conclusions from non-experimental data. Such observational data often contains confounders, variables that influence both potential causes and potential effects.…
One central goal of design of observational studies is to embed non-experimental data into an approximate randomized controlled trial using statistical matching. Despite empirical researchers' best intention and effort to create…