Related papers: Revisiting the Berkeley Admissions data: Statistic…

The use of machine learning (ML) in high-stakes societal decisions has encouraged the consideration of fairness throughout the ML lifecycle. Although data integration is one of the primary steps to generate high quality training data, most…

The persistent issue of wrongful convictions in the United States emphasizes the need for scrutiny and improvement of the criminal justice system. While statistical methods for the evaluation of forensic evidence, including glass,…

How do we learn from biased data? Historical datasets often reflect historical prejudices; sensitive or protected attributes may affect the observed treatments and outcomes. Classification algorithms tasked with predicting outcomes…

Inferring the causal structure that links n observables is usually based upon detecting statistical dependences and choosing simple graphs that make the joint measure Markovian. Here we argue why causal inference is also possible when only…

The importance of achieving fairness in machine learning models cannot be overstated. Recent research has pointed out that fairness should be examined from a causal perspective, and several fairness notions based on the on Pearl's causal…

I developed the lecture notes based on my ``Causal Inference'' course at the University of California Berkeley over the past seven years. Since half of the students were undergraduates, my lecture notes only required basic knowledge of…

Recent work on fairness in machine learning has focused on various statistical discrimination criteria and how they trade off. Most of these criteria are observational: They depend only on the joint distribution of predictor, protected…

Algorithmic fairness involves expressing notions such as equity, or reasonable treatment, as quantifiable measures that a machine learning algorithm can optimise. Most work in the literature to date has focused on classification problems…

Recent critiques of Physics Education Research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer",…

With the increased use of machine learning systems for decision making, questions about the fairness properties of such systems start to take center stage. Most existing work on algorithmic fairness assume complete observation of features…

Developing a quantum analog of the modern classical theory of causation, as formulated by Pearl and others using directed acyclic graphs, requires a theory of random or stochastic time development at the microscopic level, where the…

In a pilot program during the 2016-17 admissions cycle, the University of California, Berkeley invited many applicants for freshman admission to submit letters of recommendation. We use this pilot as the basis for an observational study of…

Algorithms are now routinely used to make consequential decisions that affect human lives. Examples include college admissions, medical interventions or law enforcement. While algorithms empower us to harness all information hidden in vast…

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…

Testing for causation, defined as the preceding impact of the past values of one variable on the current value of another one when all other pertinent information is accounted for, is increasingly utilized in empirical research of the…

Any decision, such as one about who to hire, involves two components. First, a rational component, i.e., they have a good education, they speak clearly. Second, an affective component, based on observables such as visual features of race…

Interference exists when a unit's outcome depends on another unit's treatment assignment. For example, intensive policing on one street could have a spillover effect on neighboring streets. Classical randomization tests typically break down…

This thesis scrutinizes common assumptions underlying traditional machine learning approaches to fairness in consequential decision making. After challenging the validity of these assumptions in real-world applications, we propose ways to…

Many of the traditional recommendation algorithms are designed based on the fundamental idea of mining or learning correlative patterns from data to estimate the user-item correlative preference. However, pure correlative learning may lead…

The concept of causality has a controversial history. The question of whether it is possible to represent and address causal problems with probability theory, or if fundamentally new mathematics such as the do calculus is required has been…