相关论文: Statistical Imaginaries, State Legitimacy: Grappli…
The prevalence of misinformation on online social media has tangible empirical connections to increasing political polarization and partisan antipathy in the United States. Ranking algorithms for social recommendation often encode broad…
Social consensus is important for society. Sometimes the success of society depends on a consensus (e.g. the decision to pay taxes or to commit to the constitution). Examples for continuous opinion dynamics are discussions about tax rates…
We argue that the words "objectivity" and "subjectivity" in statistics discourse are used in a mostly unhelpful way, and we propose to replace each of them with broader collections of attributes, with objectivity replaced by transparency,…
Starting with the neo-Bayesian revival of the 1950s, many statisticians argued that it was inappropriate to use Bayesian methods, and in particular subjective Bayesian methods in governmental and public policy settings because of their…
Differential privacy (DP) has been accepted as a rigorous criterion for measuring the privacy protection offered by random mechanisms used to obtain statistics or, as we will study here, synthetic datasets from confidential data. Methods to…
Confidence intervals are a fundamental tool for quantifying the uncertainty of parameters of interest. With the increase of data privacy awareness, developing a private version of confidence intervals has gained growing attention from both…
Informatics and technological advancements have triggered generation of huge volume of data with varied complexity in its management and analysis. Big Data analytics is the practice of revealing hidden aspects of such data and making…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and agent technologies offer promising solutions to the simulation of social science experiments, but the availability of data of real-world population required by many of them still poses…
With vast databases at their disposal, private tech companies can compete with public statistical agencies to provide population statistics. However, private companies face different incentives to provide high-quality statistics and to…
Government statistical agencies collect enormously valuable data on the nation's population and business activities. Wide access to these data enables evidence-based policy making, supports new research that improves society, facilitates…
Opinions are an integral part of how we perceive the world and each other. They shape collective action, playing a role in democratic processes, the evolution of norms, and cultural change. For decades, researchers in the social and natural…
We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented…
A connection between the state estimation problem and the separability problem is noticed and exploited to find efficient numerical algorithms to solve the first one. Based on these ideas, we also derive a systematic method to obtain upper…
The U.S. Census Bureau collects and publishes detailed demographic data about Americans which are heavily used by researchers and policymakers. The Bureau has recently adopted the framework of differential privacy in an effort to improve…
Recent advancements in generative AI have made it possible to create synthetic datasets that can be as accurate as real-world data for training AI models, powering statistical insights, and fostering collaboration with sensitive datasets…
The proliferation of information disseminated by public/social media has made decision-making highly challenging due to the wide availability of noisy, uncertain, or unverified information. Although the issue of uncertainty in information…
This paper examines how competing sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) risk shape governance decisions and regulatory constraints. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies, we analyse three dominant…
We consider the problem of conducting a survey with the goal of obtaining an unbiased estimator of some population statistic when individuals have unknown costs (drawn from a known prior) for participating in the survey. Individuals must be…
The United States Census Bureau faces a difficult trade-off between the accuracy of Census statistics and the protection of individual information. We conduct the first independent evaluation of bias and noise induced by the Bureau's two…
Data can be collected in scientific studies via a controlled experiment or passive observation. Big data is often collected in a passive way, e.g. from social media. In studies of causation great efforts are made to guard against bias and…