Related papers: Heritability: A Counterfactual Perspective
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 published research results are false, and controversy continues over the roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal framework…
The current rate of species extinction is rapidly approaching unprecedented highs and life on Earth presently faces a sixth mass extinction event driven by anthropogenic activity, climate change and ecological collapse. The field of…
Automated systems built on artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly deployed across high-stakes domains, raising critical concerns about fairness and the perpetuation of demographic disparities that exist in the world. In this context,…
Group fairness definitions such as Demographic Parity and Equal Opportunity make assumptions about the underlying decision-problem that restrict them to classification problems. Prior work has translated these definitions to other machine…
Progress in probabilistic generative models has accelerated, developing richer models with neural architectures, implicit densities, and with scalable algorithms for their Bayesian inference. However, there has been limited progress in…
Comparison and contrast are the basic means to unveil causation and learn which treatments work. To build good comparison groups, randomized experimentation is key, yet often infeasible. In such non-experimental settings, we illustrate and…
Counterfactual explanation is one branch of interpretable machine learning that produces a perturbation sample to change the model's original decision. The generated samples can act as a recommendation for end-users to achieve their desired…
A machine learning model, under the influence of observed or unobserved confounders in the training data, can learn spurious correlations and fail to generalize when deployed. For image classifiers, augmenting a training dataset using…
The likelihood function represents statistical evidence in the context of data and a probability model. Considerable theory has demonstrated that evidence strength for different parameter values can be interpreted from the ratio of…
Evaluation of counterfactual queries (e.g., "If A were true, would C have been true?") is important to fault diagnosis, planning, and determination of liability. In this paper we present methods for computing the probabilities of such…
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…
Balanced representation learning methods have been applied successfully to counterfactual inference from observational data. However, approaches that account for survival outcomes are relatively limited. Survival data are frequently…
We address the problem of integrating data from multiple, possibly biased, observational and interventional studies, to eventually compute counterfactuals in structural causal models. We start from the case of a single observational dataset…
Understanding the predictions made by deep learning models remains a central challenge, especially in high-stakes applications. A promising approach is to equip models with the ability to answer counterfactual questions -- hypothetical…
Counterfactual Thinking is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. It captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred, or, otherwise,…
Our approach is basically a coherence approach, but we avoid the well-known pitfalls of coherence theories of truth. Consistency is replaced by reliability, which expresses support and attack, and, in principle, every theory (or agent,…
Measuring the statistical dependence between observed signals is a primary tool for scientific discovery. However, biological systems often exhibit complex non-linear interactions that currently cannot be captured without a priori knowledge…
Contextuality is usually defined as absence of a joint distribution for a set of measurements (random variables) with known joint distributions of some of its subsets. However, if these subsets of measurements are not disjoint,…