Related papers: Decision-Making under Miscalibration
While the performance of machine learning systems has experienced significant improvement in recent years, relatively little attention has been paid to the fundamental question: to what extent can we improve our models? This paper provides…
Decision making algorithms are used in a multitude of different applications. Conventional approaches for designing decision algorithms employ principled and simplified modelling, based on which one can determine decisions via tractable…
Optimization is offered as an objective approach to resolving complex, real-world decisions involving uncertainty and conflicting interests. It drives business strategies as well as public policies and, increasingly, lies at the heart of…
National statistical institutes currently investigate how to improve the output quality of official statistics based on machine learning algorithms. A key obstacle is concept drift, i.e., when the joint distribution of independent variables…
We consider the problem of constructing probabilistic predictions that lead to accurate decisions when employed by downstream users to inform actions. For a single decision maker, designing an optimal predictor is equivalent to minimizing a…
AI generated predictions increasingly inform decision making in critical tasks, and therefore must be trustworthy. One widely used measure of trustworthiness is calibration, which requires that the predictions match the true frequencies and…
A reliable deep learning system should be able to accurately express its confidence with respect to its predictions, a quality known as calibration. One of the most effective ways to produce reliable confidence estimates with a pre-trained…
In the last decade, machine learning techniques have gained popularity for estimating causal effects. One machine learning approach that can be used for estimating an average treatment effect is Double/debiased machine learning (DML)…
The maximum utility estimation proposed by Elliott and Lieli (2013) can be viewed as cost-sensitive binary classification; thus, its in-sample overfitting issue is similar to that of perceptron learning. A utility-maximizing prediction rule…
Mediation analyses allow researchers to quantify the effect of an exposure variable on an outcome variable through a mediator variable. If a binary mediator variable is misclassified, the resulting analysis can be severely biased.…
In prediction problems, it is common to model the data-generating process and then use a model-based procedure, such as a Bayesian predictive distribution, to quantify uncertainty about the next observation. However, if the posited model is…
It is widely agreed that when AI models assist decision-makers in high-stakes domains by predicting an outcome of interest, they should communicate the confidence of their predictions. However, empirical evidence suggests that…
While shrinkage is essential in high-dimensional settings, its use for low-dimensional regression-based prediction has been debated. It reduces variance, often leading to improved prediction accuracy. However, it also inevitably introduces…
Accurate uncertainty estimates are important in sequential model-based decision-making tasks such as Bayesian optimization. However, these estimates can be imperfect if the data violates assumptions made by the model (e.g., Gaussianity).…
Survival analysis is an important problem in healthcare because it models the relationship between an individual's covariates and the onset time of an event of interest (e.g., death). It is important for survival models to be…
Precision medicine is accelerating rapidly in the field of health research. This includes fitting predictive models for individual patients based on patient similarity in an attempt to improve model performance. We propose an algorithm…
Calibration has been proposed as a way to enhance the reliability and adoption of machine learning classifiers. We study a particular aspect of this proposal: how does calibrating a classification model affect the decisions made by…
Despite recent progress in predicting biomarker trajectories from real clinical data, uncertainty in the predictions poses high-stakes risks (e.g., misdiagnosis) that limit their clinical deployment. To enable safe and reliable use of such…
Machine learning (ML) systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains where reliability is paramount. This thesis investigates how uncertainty estimation can enhance the safety and trustworthiness of ML, focusing on selective…
Binary classification models which can assign probabilities to categories such as "the tissue is 75% likely to be tumorous" or "the chemical is 25% likely to be toxic" are well understood statistically, but their utility as an input to…