Variable selection in linear regression models has been a problem since hypothesis testing began. Which variables to include or exclude from a model is not an easy task. Techniques such as Forward, Back ward, Stepwise Regression sequentially add or delete variables from a model. Penalized likelihood methods such as AIC, BIC, etc. seek to choose variables that have a significant contribution to the likelihood. Penalized sum of square methods such as LASSO and Elastic Net have been used to penalize small coefficients to only allow variables with large coefficients in the model. This work introduces an Artificial Intelligence approach to model selection where an ANN is trained to determine the significance of the variables based on OLS estimates. A simulation study shows the accuracy across various sample sizes and variances. Furthermore, a simulation study is conducted to compare the performance of the approach against Forward, Backward, AIC, BIC and LASSO. The approach is illustrated using a dataset from the World Health Organization regarding Life Expectancy. A github link is provided to the pretrained ANN that can handle up to 100 predictor variables, the original WHO dataset and the subset used in this work.

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Combining test statistics from independent trials or experiments is a popular method of meta-analysis. However, there is very limited theoretical understanding of the power of the combined test, especially in high-dimensional models considering composite hypotheses tests. We derive a mathematical framework to study standard meta-analysis testing approaches in the context of the many normal means model, which serves as the platform to investigate more complex models. We introduce a natural and mild restriction on the meta-level combination functions of the local trials. This allows us to mathematically quantify the cost of compressing m trials into real-valued test statistics and combining these. We then derive minimax lower and matching upper bounds for the separation rates of standard combination methods for e.g.

As graph neural networks (GNNs) struggle with large-scale graphs due to high computational demands, graph data distillation promises to alleviate this issue by distilling a large real graph into a smaller distilled graph while maintaining comparable prediction performance for GNNs trained on both graphs. However, we observe that GNNs trained on distilled graphs may exhibit more severe group fairness issues than GNNs trained on real graphs for vanilla and fair GNNs training. Motivated by these observations, we propose fair graph distillation (FGD), an advanced graph distillation approach to generate fair distilled graphs. The challenge lies in the deficiency of sensitive attributes for nodes in the distilled graph, making most debiasing methods (e.g., regularization and adversarial debiasing) intractable for distilled graphs. We develop a simple yet effective bias metric, named coherence, for distilled graphs. Based on the proposed coherence metric, we introduce a framework for fair graph distillation using a bi-level optimization algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better prediction performance-fairness trade-offs across various datasets and GNN architectures.

Human commonsense understanding of the physical and social world is organized around intuitive theories. These theories support making causal and moral judgments. When something bad happens, we naturally ask: who did what, and why? A rich literature in cognitive science has studied people's causal and moral intuitions. This work has revealed a number of factors that systematically influence people's judgments, such as the violation of norms and whether the harm is avoidable or inevitable.

We propose a novel and practical privacy notion called f-Membership Inference Privacy (f-MIP), which explicitly considers the capabilities of realistic adversaries under the membership inference attack threat model. Consequently, f-MIP offers interpretable privacy guarantees and improved utility (e.g., better classification accuracy). In particular, we derive a parametric family of f-MIP guarantees that we refer to as µ-Gaussian Membership Inference Privacy (µ-GMIP) by theoretically analyzing likelihood ratio-based membership inference attacks on stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Our analysis highlights that models trained with standard SGD already offer an elementary level of MIP. Additionally, we show how f-MIP can be amplified by adding noise to gradient updates.