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Who should we prioritize for treatment when causal effects cannot be estimated? In practice, organizations often rely on predictive proxies: ads are targeted using purchase probabilities, and retention incentives are allocated using…
The interpretability of prediction mechanisms with respect to the underlying prediction problem is often unclear. While several studies have focused on developing prediction models with meaningful parameters, the causal relationships…
Most approaches in algorithmic fairness constrain machine learning methods so the resulting predictions satisfy one of several intuitive notions of fairness. While this may help private companies comply with non-discrimination laws or avoid…
We show that it is possible to understand and identify a decision maker's subjective causal judgements by observing her preferences over interventions. Following Pearl [2000], we represent causality using causal models (also called…
A predictive model makes outcome predictions based on some given features, i.e., it estimates the conditional probability of the outcome given a feature vector. In general, a predictive model cannot estimate the causal effect of a feature…
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in causal reasoning for designing fair decision-making systems due to its compatibility with legal frameworks, interpretability for human stakeholders, and robustness to spurious…
We study strategic classification in binary decision-making settings where agents can modify their features in order to improve their classification outcomes. Importantly, our work considers the causal structure across different features,…
In many applications, there is a need to predict the effect of an intervention on different individuals from data. For example, which customers are persuadable by a product promotion? which patients should be treated with a certain type of…
Increasing users' positive interactions, such as purchases or clicks, is an important objective of recommender systems. Recommenders typically aim to select items that users will interact with. If the recommended items are purchased, an…
This paper discusses the fundamental principles of causal inference - the area of statistics that estimates the effect of specific occurrences, treatments, interventions, and exposures on a given outcome from experimental and observational…
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…
No man is an island, as individuals interact and influence one another daily in our society. When social influence takes place in experiments on a population of interconnected individuals, the treatment on a unit may affect the outcomes of…
Propensity score methods were proposed by Rosenbaum and Rubin [Biometrika 70 (1983) 41--55] as central tools to help assess the causal effects of interventions. Since their introduction more than two decades ago, they have found wide…
Causal models communicate our assumptions about causes and effects in real-world phe- nomena. Often the interest lies in the identification of the effect of an action which means deriving an expression from the observed probability…
Prediction models are used amongst others to inform medical decisions on interventions. Typically, individuals with high risks of adverse outcomes are advised to undergo an intervention while those at low risk are advised to refrain from…
Most work in causal inference considers deterministic interventions that set each unit's treatment to some fixed value. However, under positivity violations these interventions can lead to non-identification, inefficiency, and effects with…
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…
It has recently become popular to define treatment effects for subsets of the target population characterized by variables not observable at the time a treatment decision is made. Characterizing and estimating such treatment effects is…
While rankings are at the heart of social science research, little is known about how to analyze ranking data in experimental studies. This paper introduces a potential-outcomes framework to perform causal inference when outcome data are…
In many applications of causal inference, the treatment received by one unit may influence the outcome of another, a phenomenon referred to as interference. Although there are several frameworks for conducting causal inference in the…