Develops a personalized reinforcement learning algorithm for dyadic health interventions.
problem Personalizing health interventions for dyadic relationships in mobile health.
method Dyadic Reinforcement Learning (dyadic RL), a Bayesian and hierarchical online algorithm.
result Established a regret bound and demonstrated empirical performance through simulations and real data.
This work shifts focus from prediction to intervention in social systems.
problem The limitations of focusing solely on prediction in automated decision systems.
method Shift from prediction-focused paradigm to intervention-oriented approach.
result A new perspective unifies statistical frameworks and tools for ADS design, implementation, and evaluation.
New method evaluates multiple social disparities using machine learning.
problem Reduction of educational disparities across multiple dimensions.
method Triply-Robust Machine Learning Approach for Causal Decomposition Analysis.
result Simultaneous interventions across multiple domains reduce disparities.
Statistical test evaluates if personalizing interventions is cost-effective.
problem Balancing the benefits of personalizing interventions with their potential costs.
method Developed a statistical hypothesis test to assess the performance of personalized interventions.
result The test shows that personalized interventions can outperform standard approaches under certain conditions.
Develops algorithm to reduce real-world inequality.
problem Reduces inequality in real-world disparities.
method Impact remediation framework using social science insights and constrained optimization.
result Optimal intervention policies discovered to improve equity.
New study finds targeting based on treatment effects outperforms risk-based targeting in social interventions.
problem Lack of accurate treatment effect estimates for machine learning-based targeting in social domains.
method Empirical assessment of targeting strategies using data from 5 real-world RCTs in various domains.
result Treatment effect-based targeting outperforms risk-based targeting, even with biased estimates.
Gang violence is a severe issue in major cities across the U.S. and recent studies [Patton et al. 2017] have found evidence of social media communications that can be linked to such violence in communities with high rates of exposure to gang activity. In this paper we partnered computer scientists with social work rese…
New approach to counterfactual reasoning avoids demographic interventions.
problem Limitations of traditional counterfactual reasoning in AI systems.
method Backtracking counterfactual approach instead of interventional.
result Allows addressing social concerns without demographic interventions.
Reduces variance in noisy social outcomes to improve policy evaluation and optimization.
problem Improving access to opportunity through personalized treatment decisions.
method Data-driven dimensionality-reduction using reduced rank regression to denoise multiple outcomes.
result Improves estimation error in policy evaluation and optimization, including on real-world data.
Bayesian approach learns causal concepts from diverse social surveys.
problem Inferring causal concepts from heterogeneous data with sparse changes.
method Hierarchical Bayesian model with sequential Monte Carlo sampling.
result Model infers meaningful causal concepts and plausible relations.
Due to the recent advancements in wearables and sensing technology, health scientists are increasingly developing mobile health (mHealth) interventions. In mHealth interventions, mobile devices are used to deliver treatment to individuals as they go about their daily lives. These treatments are generally designed to im…
Personalized interventions in social services, education, and healthcare leverage individual-level causal effect predictions in order to give the best treatment to each individual or to prioritize program interventions for the individuals most likely to benefit. While the sensitivity of these domains compels us to eval…
Bayesian networks learn sub-population differences from data.
problem Inference from a single network structure can be misleading when data populations are heterogeneous.
method A mixture of Bayesian networks where component probabilities depend on individual characteristics.
result Identifies both network structures and demographic predictors of sub-population membership.
Optimizes control interventions in real-world networks using deep-learning and network science.
problem Optimizing control over socioeconomic networks subject to constraints.
method Integrates optimization tools from deep-learning with network science.
result Characterizes vulnerability of corporate networks to takeovers.
Novel approach to learn CTBNs from data with minimal interventions.
problem Learning CTBNs from time-course data with limited resources.
method Variational approximation of expected information gain for experimental design.
result Semi-analytical expression for structure and parameter learning.
The study assesses the relative value of prediction in algorithmic decision making.
problem Improving welfare through better predictions versus other policy levers.
method Theoretical analysis of statistical models.
result Simple conditions determining the relative value of prediction.
Controversies around race and machine learning have sparked debate among computer scientists over how to design machine learning systems that guarantee fairness. These debates rarely engage with how racial identity is embedded in our social experience, making for sociological and psychological complexity. This complexi…
Algorithm improves recommendation subset selection in the presence of biases.
problem Maximizing submodular functions for recommendation in the presence of social biases.
method Algorithm for submodular maximization with fairness constraints.
result Algorithm provably outputs subsets with near-optimal utility and proportional representation.
The emergence of an ageing population is a significant public health concern. This has led to an increase in the number of people living with progressive neurodegenerative disorders like dementia. Consequently, the strain this is places on health and social care services means providing 24-hour monitoring is not sustai…
Study predicts social relationships using triadic influence from social networks.
problem Difficulty in quantifying social relationships and their dynamics.
method Real social networks of 13 schools, neural networks, high-dimensional embedding.
result Triadic influence achieves highest accuracy in predicting student relationships.
Event detection has long been the domain of physical sensors operating in a static dataset assumption. The prevalence of social media and web access has led to the emergence of social, or human sensors who report on events globally. This warrants development of event detectors that can take advantage of the truly dense…
Meta-learning model predicts intervention effects from uncertain causal graphs.
problem Estimating intervention effects when causal structures are uncertain.
method Model-Averaged Causal Estimation Transformer Neural Process (MACE-TNP) using meta-learning.
result MACE-TNP outperforms Bayesian baselines in predicting intervention distributions.
Optimizes data labeling for causal effect estimation with missing outcomes.
problem Estimating causal effects with missing outcome data and budget constraints.
method Optimizes batch sampling probability to minimize variance of causal inference estimator.
result Achieves lower mean-squared error with fewer labeled data points.
New findings show single-treatment effects are unidentifiable in factorial experiments.
problem Identifying the effect of a single intervention in factorial experiments.
method Formalized sufficient conditions for the identifiability of single-treatment effects and developed nonparametric sharp bounds.
result Researchers must justify assumptions for extrapolating single-treatment effects.
A growing number of empirical studies suggest that negative advertising is effective in campaigning, while the mechanisms are rarely mentioned. With the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and Russian intervention behind the Brexit and the 2016 presidential election, people have become aware of the political ads on social m…
Learning graphical models from data is an important problem with wide applications, ranging from genomics to the social sciences. Nowadays datasets often have upwards of thousands---sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands---of variables and far fewer samples. To meet this challenge, we have developed a new R package ca…
The paper tackles fair policy targeting by optimizing allocation rules to minimize unfairness.
problem Discrimination in individualized treatments of social welfare programs.
method Formulated as a mixed-integer linear program, solved using off-the-shelf algorithms, derived regret bounds and small sample guarantees.
result Designs fair and efficient treatment allocation rules within the Pareto frontier.
Aggregation challenges causal interpretation of IV estimators.
problem Aggregation of fine-grained components into an aggregate treatment variable.
method Characterization of conditions for identifying aggregate causal effects.
result Standard IV estimators cannot identify aggregate causal effects due to ambiguous dependencies.
Hidden Markov Model helps track asymptomatic carriers in pandemic.
problem Tracking spread of asymptomatic carriers (super-spreaders) during pandemic.
method Applied Hidden Markov Model to analyze COVID-19 data.
result Better assessment of spread extent for calibrated interventions.
The past few decades has seen increased interest in the application of social robots to interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorder as behavioural coaches [4]. We consider that robots embedded in therapies could also provide quantitative diagnostic information by observing patient behaviours. The social nature of ASD sy…
Develops c-GNF for personalized social science policy analysis.
problem Challenges in estimating causal effects and counterfactual inference in social sciences.
method causal-Graphical Normalizing Flow (c-GNF) method.
result c-GNF performs well in estimating causal effects and counterfactual inference.
The study predicts how discussions in mental disorder Reddit communities affect users' emotional states.
problem Improving mental health conditions through social support analysis.
method Text embedding techniques and RNNs for predicting emotional tone shifts.
result Users' emotional states can improve due to social support, as evidenced by positive comments following negative posts.
The proliferation of fake news on social media has opened up new directions of research for timely identification and containment of fake news, and mitigation of its widespread impact on public opinion. While much of the earlier research was focused on identification of fake news based on its contents or by exploiting …
Large language models struggle with causal relationships, leading to biases and hallucinations.
problem LLMs struggle with true causal relationships, leading to biases and hallucinations.
method Embed causality into LLMs training process at every stage.
result LLMs need to be trained to understand and apply causal knowledge, not just recite it.
Personalized predictive medicine necessitates the modeling of patient illness and care processes, which inherently have long-term temporal dependencies. Healthcare observations, recorded in electronic medical records, are episodic and irregular in time. We introduce DeepCare, an end-to-end deep dynamic neural network t…
Bipolar disorder (BPD) is a chronic mental illness characterized by extreme mood and energy changes from mania to depression. These changes drive behaviors that often lead to devastating personal or social consequences. BPD is managed clinically with regular interactions with care providers, who assess mood, energy lev…
Study shows diverse data types improve SARS-COV-2 case surge predictions.
problem Improving pandemic case surge predictions using multimodal data.
method Investigated the effectiveness of biological, public health, and behavioral features.
result Diverse feature sets enhance prediction accuracy, varying by country and phase.
Estimates price sensitivity from transaction data using a novel odds ratio method.
problem Estimate price sensitivity from transaction-level data with partially observed treatment assignments.
method Recursive partitioning procedure with adversarial imputation for robust estimation.
result Validated on synthetic data and applied to three case studies, demonstrating heterogeneity in treatment effects.
Modeling bias in evaluation processes using optimization.
problem Bias in evaluation processes based on socially-salient attributes.
method Optimization-based model with two parameters: resource-information trade-off and risk-averseness.
result Characterization of distributions and effect of parameters on observed distributions.
Blended courses that mix in-person instruction with online platforms are increasingly popular in secondary education. These tools record a rich amount of data on students' study habits and social interactions. Prior research has shown that these metrics are correlated with students' performance in face to face classes.…
Estimates joint causal effects using single-variable interventions on nonlinear models.
problem Estimating joint causal effects from single-variable interventions.
method Identifiability result and practical estimator for decomposing causal effects.
result Joint effects can be inferred without joint interventional data for nonlinear additive models.
This work addresses causal inference challenges in networked interference and proposes GNN-based estimators for individual treatment effects.
problem Estimating individual treatment effects in randomized experiments with networked interference.
method Uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to capture network dependencies and derive causal effect estimators.
result Provides policy regret bounds and heuristic error bounds for GNN-based causal estimators under network interference and treatment capacity constraints.
Study disrupts Sicilian Mafia networks using data analysis.
problem Challenges in disrupting resilient criminal networks.
method Social Network Analysis methods applied to real-world datasets.
result Neutralizing only 5% of affiliates can disrupt network connectivity by 70%.
This paper tackles CRL for multi-node interventions, achieving identifiability guarantees.
problem CRL under unknown multi-node interventions, focusing on single-node assumptions.
method Establishes identifiability results for general latent causal models under stochastic interventions.
result Identifiability up to ancestors using soft interventions, perfect identifiability using hard interventions.
This work tackles causal graph discovery with stochastic interventions to minimize the number of interventions.
problem Discovering the true causal graph from observational data with limited interventions.
method Proposes a stochastic intervention model and studies verification and search problems with approximation algorithms.
result Provides approximation algorithms with competitive ratios for verification and search problems.
Causal diagrams based on do intervention are useful tools to formalize, process and understand causal relationship among variables. However, the do intervention has controversial interpretation of causal questions for non-manipulable variables, and it also lacks the power to check the conditions related to counterfactu…
Our goal is to identify beneficial interventions from observational data. We consider interventions that are narrowly focused (impacting few covariates) and may be tailored to each individual or globally enacted over a population. For applications where harmful intervention is drastically worse than proposing no change…
When consequential decisions are informed by algorithmic input, individuals may feel compelled to alter their behavior in order to gain a system's approval. Models of agent responsiveness, termed "strategic manipulation," analyze the interaction between a learner and agents in a world where all agents are equally able …