Related papers: Prediction Gaps as Pathways to Explanation: Rethin…
Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Language has the power to reinforce stereotypes and project social biases onto others. At the core of the challenge is that it is rarely what is stated explicitly, but…
Predicting future successful designs and corresponding market opportunity is a fundamental goal of product design firms. There is accordingly a long history of quantitative approaches that aim to capture diverse consumer preferences, and…
The estimation of advantage is crucial for a number of reinforcement learning algorithms, as it directly influences the choices of future paths. In this work, we propose a family of estimates based on the order statistics over the path…
Machine learning models are often used to make predictions about admissions process outcomes, such as for colleges or jobs. However, such decision processes differ substantially from the conventional machine learning paradigm. Because…
The manifestation and effect of bias in news reporting have been central topics in the social sciences for decades, and have received increasing attention in the NLP community recently. While NLP can help to scale up analyses or contribute…
Progress in large language models is increasingly constrained by an evaluation bottleneck: benchmarks must be built and models run before iteration can begin. We investigate whether evaluation outcomes can be forecast before any experiments…
Large amounts of training data are one of the major reasons for the high performance of state-of-the-art NLP models. But what exactly in the training data causes a model to make a certain prediction? We seek to answer this question by…
From the climate system to the effect of the internet on society, chaotic systems appear to have a significant role in our future. Here a method of statistical learning for a class of chaotic systems is described along with underlying…
Nonlinear machine-learning models are increasingly used to discover causal relationships in time-series data, yet the interpretation of their outputs remains poorly understood. In particular, causal scores produced by regularized neural…
Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason. Working through a set of mental steps enables us to make inferences we would not be capable of making directly even though we get no additional data from the world. Similarly, when…
A myriad of explainability methods have been proposed in recent years, but there is little consensus on how to evaluate them. While automatic metrics allow for quick benchmarking, it isn't clear how such metrics reflect human interaction…
Neural Processes (NPs) (Garnelo et al 2018a;b) approach regression by learning to map a context set of observed input-output pairs to a distribution over regression functions. Each function models the distribution of the output given an…
Contextual predictability shapes how we choose and encode words in production. The effects of a word's predictability given preceding or past context are generally well-understood in both production and comprehension, but studies of…
Improving public policy is one of the key roles of governments, and they can do this in an evidence-based way using administrative data. Causal inference for observational data improves on current practice of using descriptive or predictive…
U.S. state education agencies mark schools displaying achievement gaps between demographic subgroups as needing improvement. Some schools may have few students in these subgroups, such that average end-of-year test scores only noisily…
We consider the problem of estimating causal effects of interventions from observational data when well-known back-door and front-door adjustments are not applicable. We show that when an identifiable causal effect is subject to an implicit…
Method comparisons are essential to provide recommendations and guidance for applied researchers, who often have to choose from a plethora of available approaches. While many comparisons exist in the literature, these are often not neutral…
We study the effects of academic rank using data on the entire population of children enrolled in primary schools in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1962. Exploiting quasi-random variation in peer group composition, we estimate the causal impact of…
Performative prediction is a recently proposed framework where predictions guide decision-making and hence influence future data distributions. Such performative phenomena are ubiquitous in various areas, such as transportation, finance,…
The unparalleled ability of machine learning algorithms to learn patterns from data also enables them to incorporate biases embedded within. A biased model can then make decisions that disproportionately harm certain groups in society. Much…