Paper introduces CageBO for optimizing complex public policy problems.
arXiv research
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Predictive policing models can be biased by differential crime reporting rates.
Predictive policing systems are increasingly used to determine how to allocate police across a city in order to best prevent crime. Discovered crime data (e.g., arrest counts) are used to help update the model, and the process is repeated. Such systems have been empirically shown to be susceptible to runaway feedback l…
Automatic conflict detection has grown in relevance with the advent of body-worn technology, but existing metrics such as turn-taking and overlap are poor indicators of conflict in police-public interactions. Moreover, standard techniques to compute them fall short when applied to such diversified and noisy contexts. W…
POLICE enforces linear constraints on deep neural networks efficiently.
Develops a method to quantify racial bias in law enforcement systems.
Settings such as lending and policing can be modeled by a centralized agent allocating a resource (loans or police officers) amongst several groups, in order to maximize some objective (loans given that are repaid or criminals that are apprehended). Often in such problems fairness is also a concern. A natural notion of…
Body-worn video (BWV) cameras are increasingly utilized by police departments to provide a record of police-public interactions. However, large-scale BWV deployment produces terabytes of data per week, necessitating the development of effective computational methods to identify salient changes in video. In work carried…
Machine learning improves risk assessment for gender-based violence victims.
In political redistricting, the compactness of a district is used as a quantitative proxy for its fairness. Several well-established, yet competing, notions of geographic compactness are commonly used to evaluate the shapes of regions, including the Polsby-Popper score, the convex hull score, and the Reock score, and t…
Threshold tests have recently been proposed as a useful method for detecting bias in lending, hiring, and policing decisions. For example, in the case of credit extensions, these tests aim to estimate the bar for granting loans to white and minority applicants, with a higher inferred threshold for minorities indicative…
Body-worn cameras are now commonly used for logging daily life, sports, and law enforcement activities, creating a large volume of archived footage. This paper studies the problem of classifying frames of footage according to the activity of the camera-wearer with an emphasis on application to real-world police body-wo…
Machine learning predicts homicide clearance rates with SHAP explaining key features.
Adversarial examples have been shown to exist for a variety of deep learning architectures. Deep reinforcement learning has shown promising results on training agent policies directly on raw inputs such as image pixels. In this paper we present a novel study into adversarial attacks on deep reinforcement learning polic…
Potential violent criminals will often need to go through a sequence of preparatory steps before they can execute their plans. During this escalation process police have the opportunity to evaluate the threat posed by such people through what they know, observe and learn from intelligence reports about their activities…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic programming techniques, policy gradient algorithms face non-convex optimization pro…
Online texts -- across genres, registers, domains, and styles -- are riddled with human stereotypes, expressed in overt or subtle ways. Word embeddings, trained on these texts, perpetuate and amplify these stereotypes, and propagate biases to machine learning models that use word embeddings as features. In this work, w…
We present a new approach for detecting related crime series, by unsupervised learning of the latent feature embeddings from narratives of crime record via the Gaussian-Bernoulli Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). This is a drastically different approach from prior work on crime analysis, which typically considers on…
In this paper, a detailed study on crime classification and prediction using deep learning architectures is presented. We examine the effectiveness of deep learning algorithms on this domain and provide recommendations for designing and training deep learning systems for predicting crime areas, using open data from pol…
In this paper, we assume an insure is allowed to purchase proportional reinsurance and can invest his or her wealth into the financial market where a savings account, stocks and bonds are available. Different from classical optimal investment and reinsurance problem, this paper studies the insurer's long-term investmen…
Machine learning can impact people with legal or ethical consequences when it is used to automate decisions in areas such as insurance, lending, hiring, and predictive policing. In many of these scenarios, previous decisions have been made that are unfairly biased against certain subpopulations, for example those of a …
2020 Census uses more noise to protect privacy than needed, improving data accuracy.
Efficiently calculates privacy guarantees for 2020 Census data.
Machine learning predicts criminal networks' missing partnerships and future behavior.
Black-box risk scoring models permeate our lives, yet are typically proprietary or opaque. We propose Distill-and-Compare, a model distillation and comparison approach to audit such models. To gain insight into black-box models, we treat them as teachers, training transparent student models to mimic the risk scores ass…
Crimes emerge out of complex interactions of human behaviors and situations. Linkages between crime incidents are highly complex. Detecting crime linkage given a set of incidents is a highly challenging task since we only have limited information, including text descriptions, incident times, and locations. In practice,…
Model traffic congestion events using multi-modal data and attention-based neural networks.
New model for multivariate discrete event data with flexible interactions.
In recent years, air traffic communication data has become easy to access, enabling novel research in many fields. Exploiting this new data source, a wide range of applications have emerged, from weather forecasting to stock market prediction, or the collection of information about military and government movements. Ty…
The ubiquity of systems using artificial intelligence or "AI" has brought increasing attention to how those systems should be regulated. The choice of how to regulate AI systems will require care. AI systems have the potential to synthesize large amounts of data, allowing for greater levels of personalization and preci…
Survey and compare PAC-Bayes bounds for bandit problems.
Applying probabilistic models to reinforcement learning (RL) enables the application of powerful optimisation tools such as variational inference to RL. However, existing inference frameworks and their algorithms pose significant challenges for learning optimal policies, e.g., the absence of mode capturing behaviour in…
New method recovers diverse policies from expert data using state-action pair weighting.
Domestic violence (DV) is a global social and public health issue that is highly gendered. Being able to accurately predict DV recidivism, i.e., re-offending of a previously convicted offender, can speed up and improve risk assessment procedures for police and front-line agencies, better protect victims of DV, and pote…
Data-driven algorithms play a large role in decision making across a variety of industries. Increasingly, these algorithms are being used to make decisions that have significant ramifications for people's social and economic well-being, e.g. in sentencing, loan approval, and policing. Amid the proliferation of such sys…
Framework uses human annotations to make models robust to spurious correlations.
In this paper, we analyse some equity-linked contracts that are related to drawdown and drawup events based on assets governed by a geometric spectrally negative Lévy process. Drawdown and drawup refer to the differences between the historical maximum and minimum of the asset price and its current value, respectively. …
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break before an optimal controller can be learned. To address this issue, we propose a cont…
Societies often rely on human experts to take a wide variety of decisions affecting their members, from jail-or-release decisions taken by judges and stop-and-frisk decisions taken by police officers to accept-or-reject decisions taken by academics. In this context, each decision is taken by an expert who is typically …
New strategies for identifying the best arm in bandits with decreasing variances.
This work bridges offline RL and DRL to address distributional shift.
New AI governance framework tackles risks in finance.
New framework models time-uncertain point processes for better event prediction.
Model-Based Offline Planning (MBOP) learns models from offline data to control systems directly.
Framework integrates mental disorder measurements for personalized treatment.
Labor market institutions are central for modern economies, and their polices can directly affect unemployment rates and economic growth. At the individual level, unemployment often has a detrimental impact on people's well-being and health. At the national level, high employment is one of the central goals of any econ…
Predictive modeling is increasingly being employed to assist human decision-makers. One purported advantage of replacing human judgment with computer models in high stakes settings-- such as sentencing, hiring, policing, college admissions, and parole decisions-- is the perceived "neutrality" of computers. It is argued…
Large-scale trends in urban crime and global terrorism are well-predicted by socio-economic drivers, but focused, event-level predictions have had limited success. Standard machine learning approaches are promising, but lack interpretability, are generally interpolative, and ineffective for precise future interventions…