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When we compare the influences of two causes on an outcome, if the conclusion from every group is against that from the conflation, we think there is Simpson's Paradox. The Existing Causal Inference Theory (ECIT) can make the overall…
Difference-in-differences (DID) is popular because it can allow for unmeasured confounding when the key assumption of parallel trends holds. However, there exists little guidance on how to decide a priori whether this assumption is…
This paper describes a natural language parsing algorithm for unrestricted text which uses a probability-based scoring function to select the "best" parse of a sentence. The parser, Pearl, is a time-asynchronous bottom-up chart parser with…
A fundamental challenge in the empirical sciences involves uncovering causal structure through observation and experimentation. Causal discovery entails linking the conditional independence (CI) invariances in observational data to their…
The allocation of resources among multiple agents is a fundamental problem in both economics and computer science. In these settings, fairness plays a crucial role in ensuring social acceptability and practical implementation of resource…
With AI systems widely applied to assist humans in decision-making processes such as talent hiring, school admission, and loan approval; there is an increasing need to ensure that the decisions made are fair. One major challenge for…
The likelihood principle makes strong claims about the nature of statistical evidence but is controversial. Its claims are undermined by the existence of several examples that are assumed to show that it allows, with unity probability,…
Many statistical problems in causal inference involve a probability distribution other than the one from which data are actually observed; as an additional complication, the object of interest is often a marginal quantity of this other…
Bell's inequality sets a strict threshold for how strongly correlated the outcomes of measurements on two or more particles can be, if the outcomes of each measurement are independent of actions undertaken at arbitrarily distant locations.…
We propose a new family of fairness definitions for classification problems that combine some of the best properties of both statistical and individual notions of fairness. We posit not only a distribution over individuals, but also a…
Causality is widely used in fairness analysis to prevent discrimination on sensitive attributes, such as genders in career recruitment and races in crime prediction. However, the current data-based Potential Outcomes Framework (POF) often…
Simpson's paradox is an obstacle to establishing a probabilistic association between two events $a_1$ and $a_2$, given the third (lurking) random variable $B$. We focus on scenarios when the random variables $A$ (which combines $a_1$,…
This tutorial provides a concise introduction to modern causal modeling by integrating potential outcomes and graphical methods. We motivate causal questions such as counterfactual reasoning under interventions and define binary treatments…
Causal Inference offers a fundamental approach for advancing empirical software engineering (ESE) beyond traditional statistical association, enabling researchers to rigorously identify and quantify causal relationships in software…
Ibeling et al. (2023). axiomatize increasingly expressive languages of causation and probability, and Mosse et al. (2024) show that reasoning (specifically the satisfiability problem) in each causal language is as difficult, from a…
The discovery of discriminatory bias in human or automated decision making is a task of increasing importance and difficulty, exacerbated by the pervasive use of machine learning and data mining. Currently, discrimination discovery largely…
We consider the problem of designing affirmative action policies for selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants. We assume that for each candidate we have socio-demographic attributes and a series of variables that serve as…
In 1957, Lindley published "A statistical paradox" in Biometrika, revealing a fundamental conflict between frequentist and Bayesian inference as sample size approaches infinity. We present a new paradox of a different kind: a conflict…
Despite the essential need for comprehensive considerations in responsible AI, factors like robustness, fairness, and causality are often studied in isolation. Adversarial perturbation, used to identify vulnerabilities in models, and…
The causal modelling of Bell experiments relies on three fundamental assumptions: locality, freedom of choice, and arrow-of-time. It turns out that nature violates Bell inequalities, which entails the failure of at least one of those…