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Applied researchers in biomedicine and related fields are often interested in estimating the causal effect of a treatment or intervention. Although randomized clinical trials are considered the gold standard for establishing causal effects,…
Causal machine learning methods which flexibly generate heterogeneous treatment effect estimates could be very useful tools for governments trying to make and implement policy. However, as the critical artificial intelligence literature has…
Should prediction models always deliver a prediction? In the pursuit of maximum predictive performance, critical considerations of reliability and fairness are often overshadowed, particularly when it comes to the role of uncertainty.…
Empirical investigations into unintended model behavior often show that the algorithm is predicting another outcome than what was intended. These exposes highlight the need to identify when algorithms predict unintended quantities - ideally…
Evaluating the causal impacts of possible interventions is crucial for informing decision-making, especially towards improving access to opportunity. However, if causal effects are heterogeneous and predictable from covariates, personalized…
Credit scoring models based on accepted applications may be biased and their consequences can have a statistical and economic impact. Reject inference is the process of attempting to infer the creditworthiness status of the rejected…
Identifying covariates that modify treatment effects is a central problem in causal inference. Yet existing data-adaptive procedures do not provide finite-sample control over the expected number of false discoveries, risking spurious…
This dissertation focuses on modern causal inference under uncertainty and data restrictions, with applications to neoadjuvant clinical trials, distributed data networks, and robust individualized decision making. In the first project, we…
Data fusion techniques integrate information from heterogeneous data sources to improve learning, generalization, and decision making across data sciences. In causal inference, these methods leverage rich observational data to improve…
Curse of Dimensionality is an unavoidable challenge in statistical probability models, yet diffusion models seem to overcome this limitation, achieving impressive results in high-dimensional data generation. Diffusion models assume that…
Reinforcement learning systems will to a greater and greater extent make decisions that significantly impact the well-being of humans, and it is therefore essential that these systems make decisions that conform to our expectations of…
In many settings, interventions may be more effective for some individuals than others, so that targeting interventions may be beneficial. We analyze the value of targeting in the context of a large-scale field experiment with over 53,000…
Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…
Large language models are increasingly used to support high-stakes decisions, potentially influencing who is granted bail or receives a loan. Naive chain-of-thought sampling can improve average decision accuracy, but has also been shown to…
Prior work has proposed a simple strategy for reinforcement learning (RL): label experience with the outcomes achieved in that experience, and then imitate the relabeled experience. These outcome-conditioned imitation learning methods are…
Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…
Artificial intelligence researchers have made significant advances in legal intelligence in recent years. However, the existing studies have not focused on the important value embedded in judgments reversals, which limits the improvement of…
Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with machine learning has attracted substantial attention in both academic research and industrial practice. However, the two communities often evaluate models under markedly different conditions.…
We show that, under a standard hardness assumption, there is no computationally efficient algorithm that given $n$ samples from an unknown distribution can give valid answers to $n^{3+o(1)}$ adaptively chosen statistical queries. A…
The inherent ambiguity of cause and effect boundaries poses a challenge in evaluating causal event extraction tasks. Traditional metrics like Exact Match and BertScore poorly reflect model performance, so we trained evaluation models to…