Related papers: What does it mean to be "representative"?
We present a conceptual model to measure disparity--the target study--where social groups may be similarly situated (i.e., balanced) on allowable covariates. Our model, based on a sampling design, does not intervene to assign social group…
I welcome the contribution from Falessi et al. [1] hereafter referred to as F++ , and the ensuing debate. Experimentation is an important tool within empirical software engineering, so how we select participants is clearly a relevant…
Textbooks on statistics emphasize care and precision, via concepts such as reliability and validity in measurement, random sampling and treatment assignment in data collection, and causal identification and bias in estimation. But how do…
Many applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) require them to either simulate people or offer personalized functionality, making the demographic representativeness of LLMs crucial for equitable utility. At the same time, we know little…
Randomized trials are considered the gold standard for estimating causal effects. Trial findings are often used to inform policy and programming efforts, yet their results may not generalize well to a relevant target population due to…
A common problem in LLM evaluation is how to choose a subset of metrics from a full suite of possible metrics. Subset selection is usually done for efficiency or interpretability reasons, and the goal is often to select a ``representative''…
The success of neural networks builds to a large extent on their ability to create internal knowledge representations from real-world high-dimensional data, such as images, sound, or text. Approaches to extract and present these…
We present methods for causally interpretable meta-analyses that combine information from multiple randomized trials to estimate potential (counterfactual) outcome means and average treatment effects in a target population. We consider…
Diversity indices are useful single-number metrics for characterizing a complex distribution of a set of attributes across a population of interest. The utility of these different metrics or sets of metrics depend on the context and…
Simulation studies are computer experiments that involve creating data by pseudorandom sampling. The key strength of simulation studies is the ability to understand the behaviour of statistical methods because some 'truth' (usually some…
We take steps towards causally interpretable meta-analysis by describing methods for transporting causal inferences from a collection of randomized trials to a new target population, one-trial-at-a-time and pooling all trials. We discuss…
The last few years have seen the proliferation of measures that quantify the scientific output of researches. Yet, these measures focus on productivity, thus fostering the "publish or perish" paradigm. This article proposes a measure that…
Data analyses are often constructed in an imperative manner, where commands representing actions taken on the data are issued sequentially. The publication of these commands, along with the data, is essential to the reproducibility of the…
This paper reviews concepts, modeling approaches, and recent findings along a spectrum of different levels of abstraction of neural network models including generalization across (1) Samples, (2) Distributions, (3) Domains, (4) Tasks, (5)…
The form and justification of inductive inference rules depend strongly on the representation of uncertainty. This paper examines one generic representation, namely, incomplete information. The notion can be formalized by presuming that the…
Text embeddings have become central to computational social science and psychology, enabling scalable measurement of meaning and mixed-method inference. Yet most representation learning is optimized and evaluated for prediction and…
Epidemiologists and applied statisticians often believe that relative effect measures conditional on covariates, such as risk ratios and mean ratios, are ``transportable'' across populations. Here, we examine the identification of causal…
Sample pooling consists in combining samples from multiple individuals into a single pool that is then tested using a unique test-kit. A positive test means that at least one individual within the pool is infected. Here, we propose an…
Statistical modeling is a powerful tool for developing and testing theories by way of causal explanation, prediction, and description. In many disciplines there is near-exclusive use of statistical modeling for causal explanation and the…
Recent work has made important contributions in the development of causally-interpretable meta-analysis. These methods transport treatment effects estimated in a collection of randomized trials to a target population of interest. Ideally,…