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Hidden Markov models have successfully been applied as models of discrete time series in many fields. Often, when applied in practice, the parameters of these models have to be estimated. The currently predominating identification methods,…
The measurement of human behavior remains a central challenge across the behavioral sciences. Traditional approaches typically rely on passive observation of responses collected under static or weakly controlled conditions, limiting the…
One obstacle to ``elevating" correlation to causation is the phenomenon of confounding, i.e., when a correlation between two variables exists because both variables are in fact caused by a third variable. The situation where the confounders…
Face-to-face social interactions are an important aspect of peoples' social lives. A lack of interactions can explain how individuals develop depressive symptoms, but depressive symptoms can also explain how individuals engage in social…
Monitoring and reporting incorrect acts are pervasive for maintaining human cooperation, but in theory it is unclear how they influence each other. To explore their possible interactions we consider spatially structured population where…
Observational studies are a key resource for causal inference but are often affected by systematic biases. Prior work has focused mainly on detecting these biases, via sensitivity analyses and comparisons with randomized controlled trials,…
Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…
Protest activity, a constitutionally protected right in the United States under the First Amendment, serves as a key tool for individuals with limited individual influence to unite collectively and amplify their impact. Despite its legal…
We present a model for the equilibrium frequency of offenses and the informativeness of witness reports when potential offenders can commit multiple offenses and witnesses are subject to retaliation risk and idiosyncratic reporting…
Censorship and the distribution of false information, tools used to manipulate what users see and believe, are seemingly at opposite ends of the information access spectrum. Most previous work has examined them in isolation and within…
To conduct causal inference in observational settings, researchers must rely on certain identifying assumptions. In practice, these assumptions are unlikely to hold exactly. This paper considers the bias of selection-on-observables,…
Ranking and scoring are ubiquitous. We consider the setting in which an institution, called a ranker, evaluates a set of individuals based on demographic, behavioral or other characteristics. The final output is a ranking that represents…
Behavior of systems that are functions of anticipated behavior of other systems, whose own behavior is also anticipatory but homeostatic and determined by hierarchical ordering, which changes over time, of sets of possible environments that…
Algorithmic risk assessment instruments (RAIs) increasingly inform decision-making in criminal justice. RAIs largely rely on arrest records as a proxy for underlying crime. Problematically, the extent to which arrests reflect overall…
We consider the problems of detection and localization of a contiguous block of weak activation in a large matrix, from a small number of noisy, possibly adaptive, compressive (linear) measurements. This is closely related to the problem of…
Results in epidemiology and social science often require the removal of confounding effects from measurements of the pairwise correlation of variables in survey data. This is typically accomplished by some variant of linear regression…
In this paper, we prove a large deviation principle for the empirical measures of a system of weakly interacting diffusion with reflection. We adopt the weak convergence approach. To make this approach work, we show that the sequence of…
In economic applications, model averaging has found principal use examining the validity of various theories related to observed heterogeneity in outcomes such as growth, development, and trade.Though often easy to articulate, these…
In 2007, Alexander Shapovalov posed an old twist on the classical coin weighing problem by asking for strategies that manage to conceal the identities of specific coins while providing general information on the number of fake coins. In…
We consider Hidden Markov Models that emit sequences of observations that are drawn from continuous distributions. For example, such a model may emit a sequence of numbers, each of which is drawn from a uniform distribution, but the support…