This personalized approach not only enhances the efficacy of treatments but also minimizes the risk of adverse effects (Agyeman and Ofori-Asenso, 2015; Kumari et al., 2023). However, the success of precision medicine heavily relies on the interpretation of complex, multidimensional data sets, where statistical analysis plays a pivotal role (Alyass et al., 2015). The integration of statistical methodologies in precision medicine is not just a mere addition but a fundamental necessity. Advanced statistical techniques enable the extraction of meaningful insights from large-scale genomics, proteomic, and metabolomic data, which are the cornerstone of precision medicine (Wafi and Mirnezami, 2018; Pinu et al., 2019). These methodologies include, but are not limited to, predictive modeling, machine learning algorithms, and complex data visualization techniques, all of which contribute to more accurate diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning (Bellazzi and Zupan, 2008; Davatzikos et al., 2018; Richter and Khoshgoftaar, 2018). The heterogeneity of data sources in precision medicine, ranging from electronic health records (EHRs) to high-throughput sequencing data, presents unique challenges in data integration and interpretation (Martinez-Garcia and Hernández-Lemus, 2022). Statistical analysis serves as a bridge, merging these diverse data types into coherent, interpretable information that can guide clinical decision-making. However, the field is not without its challenges. Issues such as overfitting, handling of highdimensional data, and maintaining the balance between model complexity and interpretability are ongoing areas of research (Bolón-Canedo et al., 2015; Xu et al., 2019; Bommert, 2020; Pes, 2020; Hou and Behdinan, 2022).

Recent text-based causal methods attempt to mitigate confounding bias by including unstructured text data as proxies of confounding variables that are partially or imperfectly measured. These approaches assume analysts have supervised labels of the confounders given text for a subset of instances, a constraint that is not always feasible due to data privacy or cost. Here, we address settings in which an important confounding variable is completely unobserved. We propose a new causal inference method that splits pre-treatment text data, infers two proxies from two zero-shot models on the separate splits, and applies these proxies in the proximal g-formula. We prove that our text-based proxy method satisfies identification conditions required by the proximal g-formula while other seemingly reasonable proposals do not. We evaluate our method in synthetic and semi-synthetic settings and find that it produces estimates with low bias. This combination of proximal causal inference and zero-shot classifiers is novel (to our knowledge) and expands the set of text-specific causal methods available to practitioners.

We present a boosting-based method to learn additive Structural Equation Models (SEMs) from observational data, with a focus on the theoretical aspects of determining the causal order among variables. We introduce a family of score functions based on arbitrary regression techniques, for which we establish necessary conditions to consistently favor the true causal ordering. Our analysis reveals that boosting with early stopping meets these criteria and thus offers a consistent score function for causal orderings. To address the challenges posed by high-dimensional data sets, we adapt our approach through a component-wise gradient descent in the space of additive SEMs. Our simulation study underlines our theoretical results for lower dimensions and demonstrates that our high-dimensional adaptation is competitive with state-of-the-art methods. In addition, it exhibits robustness with respect to the choice of the hyperparameters making the procedure easy to tune.

In recent years, the development of technologies for causal inference with privacy preservation of distributed data has gained considerable attention. Many existing methods for distributed data focus on resolving the lack of subjects (samples) and can only reduce random errors in estimating treatment effects. In this study, we propose a data collaboration quasi-experiment (DC-QE) that resolves the lack of both subjects and covariates, reducing random errors and biases in the estimation. Our method involves constructing dimensionality-reduced intermediate representations from private data from local parties, sharing intermediate representations instead of private data for privacy preservation, estimating propensity scores from the shared intermediate representations, and finally, estimating the treatment effects from propensity scores. Through numerical experiments on both artificial and real-world data, we confirm that our method leads to better estimation results than individual analyses. While dimensionality reduction loses some information in the private data and causes performance degradation, we observe that sharing intermediate representations with many parties to resolve the lack of subjects and covariates sufficiently improves performance to overcome the degradation caused by dimensionality reduction. Although external validity is not necessarily guaranteed, our results suggest that DC-QE is a promising method. With the widespread use of our method, intermediate representations can be published as open data to help researchers find causalities and accumulate a knowledge base.

This paper explores the application of Shapley Value Regression in dissecting marketing performance at channel-partner level, complementing channel-level Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM). Utilizing real-world data from the financial services industry, we demonstrate the practicality of Shapley Value Regression in evaluating individual partner contributions. Although structured in-field testing along with cooperative game theory is most accurate, it can often be highly complex and expensive to conduct. Shapley Value Regression is thus a more feasible approach to disentangle the influence of each marketing partner within a marketing channel. We also propose a simple method to derive adjusted coefficients of Shapley Value Regression and compares it with alternative approaches.

In this paper, we introduce "InfiAgent-DABench", the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM-based agents in data analysis tasks. This benchmark contains DAEval, a dataset consisting of 311 data analysis questions derived from 55 CSV files, and an agent framework to evaluate LLMs as data analysis agents. We adopt a format-prompting technique, ensuring questions to be closed-form that can be automatically evaluated. Our extensive benchmarking of 23 state-of-the-art LLMs uncovers the current challenges encountered in data analysis tasks. In addition, we have developed DAAgent, a specialized agent trained on instruction-tuning datasets. Evaluation datasets and toolkits for InfiAgent-DABench are released at https://github.com/InfiAgent/InfiAgent.

We discuss the issue of finding a good mathematical programming solver configuration for a particular instance of a given problem, and we propose a two-phase approach to solve it. In the first phase we learn the relationships between the instance, the configuration and the performance of the configured solver on the given instance. A specific difficulty of learning a good solver configuration is that parameter settings may not all be independent; this requires enforcing (hard) constraints, something that many widely used supervised learning methods cannot natively achieve. We tackle this issue in the second phase of our approach, where we use the learnt information to construct and solve an optimization problem having an explicit representation of the dependency/consistency constraints on the configuration parameter settings. We discuss computational results for two different instantiations of this approach on a unit commitment problem arising in the short-term planning of hydro valleys. We use logistic regression as the supervised learning methodology and consider CPLEX as the solver of interest.

An important task in the field of sensor technology is the efficient implementation of adaptation procedures of measurements from one sensor to another sensor of identical design. One idea is to use the estimation of an affine transformation between different systems, which can be improved by the knowledge of experts. This paper presents an improved solution from Glacier Research that was published back in 1973. The results demonstrate the adaptability of this solution for various applications, including software calibration of sensors, implementation of expert-based adaptation, and paving the way for future advancements such as distributed learning methods. One idea here is to use the knowledge of experts for estimating an affine transformation between different systems. We evaluate our research with simulations and also with real measured data of a multi-sensor board with 8 identical sensors. Both data set and evaluation script are provided for download. The results show an improvement for both the simulation and the experiments with real data.

We propose two novel purpose-built deep learning (DL) models for synthesis of the arterial blood pressure (ABP) waveform in a cuff-less manner, using a single-site photoplethysmography (PPG) signal. We utilize the public UCI dataset on cuff-less blood pressure (CLBP) estimation to train and evaluate our DL models. Firstly, we implement a transformer model that incorporates positional encoding, multi-head attention, layer normalization, and dropout techniques, and synthesizes the ABP waveform with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 14. Secondly, we implement a frequency-domain (FD) learning approach where we first obtain the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of the PPG and ABP signals corresponding to two cardiac cycles, and then learn a linear/non-linear (L/NL) regression between them. We learn that the FD L/NL regression model outperforms the transformer model by achieving an MAE of 11.87 and 8.01, for diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and systolic blood pressure (SBP), respectively. Our FD L/NL regression model also fulfills the AAMI criterion of utilizing data from more than 85 subjects, and achieves grade B by the BHS criterion.

Survival analysis studies and predicts the time of death, or other singular unrepeated events, based on historical data, while the true time of death for some instances is unknown. Survival trees enable the discovery of complex nonlinear relations in a compact human comprehensible model, by recursively splitting the population and predicting a distinct survival distribution in each leaf node. We use dynamic programming to provide the first survival tree method with optimality guarantees, enabling the assessment of the optimality gap of heuristics. We improve the scalability of our method through a special algorithm for computing trees up to depth two. The experiments show that our method's run time even outperforms some heuristics for realistic cases while obtaining similar out-of-sample performance with the state-of-the-art.