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Related papers: Auditing Fairness under Unobserved Confounding

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We present a method for assessing the sensitivity of the true causal effect to unmeasured confounding. The method requires the analyst to set two intuitive parameters. Otherwise, the method is assumption-free. The method returns an interval…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-07 Jose M. Peña

In studies of discrimination, researchers often seek to estimate a causal effect of race or gender on outcomes. For example, in the criminal justice context, one might ask whether arrested individuals would have been subsequently charged or…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-06 Johann Gaebler , William Cai , Guillaume Basse , Ravi Shroff , Sharad Goel , Jennifer Hill

Unobserved confounding is a central barrier to drawing causal inferences from observational data. Several authors have recently proposed that this barrier can be overcome in the case where one attempts to infer the effects of several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-20 Alexander D'Amour

A key objective of decomposition analysis is to identify a factor (the 'mediator') contributing to disparities in an outcome between social groups. In decomposition analysis, a scholarly interest often centers on estimating how much the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-27 Soojin Park , Suyeon Kang , Chioun Lee , Shujie Ma

We study the identification and estimation of long-term treatment effects under unobserved confounding by combining an experimental sample, where the long-term outcome is missing, with an observational sample, where the treatment assignment…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-27 Ting-Chih Hung , Yu-Chang Chen

This paper deals with the problem of evaluating the causal effect using observational data in the presence of an unobserved exposure/ outcome variable, when cause-effect relationships between variables can be described as a directed acyclic…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-06-18 Manabu Kuroki , Zhihong Cai

This work tackles the issue of fairness in the context of generative procedures, such as image super-resolution, which entail different definitions from the standard classification setting. Moreover, while traditional group fairness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-05 Ajil Jalal , Sushrut Karmalkar , Jessica Hoffmann , Alexandros G. Dimakis , Eric Price

Inferring causal effects of continuous-valued treatments from observational data is a crucial task promising to better inform policy- and decision-makers. A critical assumption needed to identify these effects is that all confounding…

Inferring the causal effect of a non-randomly assigned exposure on an outcome requires adjusting for common causes of the exposure and outcome to avoid biased conclusions. Notwithstanding the efforts investigators routinely make to measure…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-04 Wen Wei Loh , Stijn Vansteelandt

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-18 Oliver L. Pescott , Robin J. Boyd , Gary D. Powney , Gavin B. Stewart

Accurate time-to-event prediction is integral to decision-making, informing medical guidelines, hiring decisions, and resource allocation. Survival analysis, the quantitative framework used to model time-to-event data, accounts for patients…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Vincent Jeanselme , Brian Tom , Jessica Barrett

The ability to understand and trust the fairness of model predictions, particularly when considering the outcomes of unprivileged groups, is critical to the deployment and adoption of machine learning systems. SHAP values provide a unified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-29 James M. Hickey , Pietro G. Di Stefano , Vlasios Vasileiou

Along with the increasing availability of health data has come the rise of data-driven models to inform decision-making and policy. These models have the potential to benefit both patients and health care providers but can also exacerbate…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-16 Solvejg Wastvedt , Jared Huling , Julian Wolfson

Fair predictive algorithms hinge on both equality and trust, yet inherent uncertainty in real-world data challenges our ability to make consistent, fair, and calibrated decisions. While fairly managing predictive error has been extensively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Lucas Rosenblatt , R. Teal Witter

Traditional ranking algorithms are designed to retrieve the most relevant items for a user's query, but they often inherit biases from data that can unfairly disadvantage vulnerable groups. Fairness in information access systems (IAS) is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Thomas Jaenich , Alejandro Moreo , Alessandro Fabris , Graham McDonald , Andrea Esuli , Iadh Ounis , Fabrizio Sebastiani

Recommender systems are seen as an effective tool to address information overload, but it is widely known that the presence of various biases makes direct training on large-scale observational data result in sub-optimal prediction…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Haoxuan Li , Yanghao Xiao , Chunyuan Zheng , Peng Wu

Various measures can be used to estimate bias or unfairness in a predictor. Previous work has already established that some of these measures are incompatible with each other. Here we show that, when groups differ in prevalence of the…

Applications · Statistics 2017-09-13 Thomas Miconi

The possibility of unmeasured confounding is one of the main limitations for causal inference from observational studies. There are different methods for (partially) empirically assessing the plausibility of unconfoundedness. However, most…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-28 Fernando Pires Hartwig , Kate Tilling , George Davey Smith

The presence of unobserved confounders is one of the main challenges in identifying treatment effects. In this paper, we propose a new approach to causal inference using panel data with large large $N$ and $T$. Our approach imputes the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-03-28 Ben Deaner , Chen-Wei Hsiang , Andrei Zeleneev

Before deploying a black-box model in high-stakes problems, it is important to evaluate the model's performance on sensitive subpopulations. For example, in a recidivism prediction task, we may wish to identify demographic groups for which…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-09 John J. Cherian , Emmanuel J. Candès