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We introduce a new method for estimating the mean of an outcome variable within groups when researchers only observe the average of the outcome and group indicators across a set of aggregation units, such as geographical areas. Existing…

Machine Learning explainability techniques have been proposed as a means of `explaining' or interrogating a model in order to understand why a particular decision or prediction has been made. Such an ability is especially important at a…

Support vector machine (SVM) is a well-known statistical technique for classification problems in machine learning and other fields. An important question for SVM is the selection of covariates (or features) for the model. Many studies have…

Instruction tuning plays a critical role in enhancing the performance and efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs). Its success depends not only on the quality of the instruction data but also on the inherent capabilities of the LLM…

In traditional Machine Learning, the algorithms predictions are based on the assumption that the data follows the same distribution in both the training and the test datasets. However, in real world data this condition does not hold and,…

We consider scenarios where a very accurate (often small) predictive model using restricted features is available when training a full-featured (often larger) model. This restricted model may be thought of as side-information'', and can…

Although most pregnancies result in a good outcome, complications are not uncommon and can be associated with serious implications for mothers and babies. Predictive modeling has the potential to improve outcomes through better…

One of the fundamental challenges in causal inference is to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on its outcome of interest from observational data. However, causal effect estimation often suffers from the impacts of confounding bias…

Our goal is to produce methods for observational causal inference that are auditable, easy to troubleshoot, accurate for treatment effect estimation, and scalable to high-dimensional data. We describe a general framework called…

Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) is a popular method to perform interpretability of any kind of Machine Learning (ML) model. It explains one ML prediction at a time, by learning a simple linear model around the…

Variational inference is an umbrella term for algorithms which cast Bayesian inference as optimization. Classically, variational inference uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to define the optimization. Though this divergence has been…

It is commonly believed that increasing the interpretability of a machine learning model may decrease its predictive power. However, inspecting input-output relationships of those models using visual analytics, while treating them as…

Interpretable Machine Learning (IML) methods are used to gain insight into the relevance of a feature of interest for the performance of a model. Commonly used IML methods differ in whether they consider features of interest in isolation,…

When primary objectives are insensitive or delayed, experimenters may instead focus on proxy metrics derived from secondary outcomes. For example, technology companies often infer the long-term impacts of product interventions from their…

Instrumental variables (IV) regression is widely used to estimate causal treatment effects in settings where receipt of treatment is not fully random, but there exists an instrument that generates exogenous variation in treatment exposure.…

Combining machine learning with econometric analysis is becoming increasingly prevalent in both research and practice. A common empirical strategy involves the application of predictive modeling techniques to 'mine' variables of interest…

Statistical models are central to machine learning with broad applicability across a range of downstream tasks. The models are controlled by free parameters that are typically estimated from data by maximum-likelihood estimation or…

Understanding how changes in explanatory features affect the unconditional distribution of the outcome is important in many applications. However, existing black-box predictive models are not readily suited for analyzing such questions. In…

One of the key elements of explanatory analysis of a predictive model is to assess the importance of individual variables. Rapid development of the area of predictive model exploration (also called explainable artificial intelligence or…

Importance sampling is a central idea underlying off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. It provides a strategy for re-weighting samples from a distribution to obtain unbiased estimates under another distribution. However,…