This study examines the influence of Google's search algorithm on news diversity by analyzing search results in Brazil, the UK, and the US. It explores how Google's system preferentially favors a limited number of news outlets. Utilizing algorithm auditing techniques, the research measures source concentration with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) and Gini coefficient, revealing significant concentration trends. The study underscores the importance of conducting horizontal analyses across multiple search queries, as focusing solely on individual results pages may obscure these patterns. Factors such as popularity, political bias, and recency were evaluated for their impact on news rankings. Findings indicate a slight leftward bias in search outcomes and a preference for popular, often national outlets. This bias, combined with a tendency to prioritize recent content, suggests that Google's algorithm may reinforce existing media inequalities. By analyzing the largest dataset to date -- 221,863 search results -- this research provides comprehensive, longitudinal insights into how algorithms shape public access to diverse news sources.

The study of cause-and-effect is of the utmost importance in many branches of science, but also for many practical applications of intelligent systems. In particular, identifying causal relationships in situations that include hidden factors is a major challenge for methods that rely solely on observational data for building causal models. This paper proposes CAnDOIT, a causal discovery method to reconstruct causal models using both observational and interventional time-series data. The use of interventional data in the causal analysis is crucial for real-world applications, such as robotics, where the scenario is highly complex and observational data alone are often insufficient to uncover the correct causal structure. Validation of the method is performed initially on randomly generated synthetic models and subsequently on a well-known benchmark for causal structure learning in a robotic manipulation environment. The experiments demonstrate that the approach can effectively handle data from interventions and exploit them to enhance the accuracy of the causal analysis. A Python implementation of CAnDOIT has also been developed and is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/lcastri/causalflow.

Large-scale diffusion models like Stable Diffusion are powerful and find various real-world applications while customizing such models by fine-tuning is both memory and time inefficient. Motivated by the recent progress in natural language processing, we investigate parameter-efficient tuning in large diffusion models by inserting small learnable modules (termed adapters). In particular, we decompose the design space of adapters into orthogonal factors -- the input position, the output position as well as the function form, and perform Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), a classical statistical approach for analyzing the correlation between discrete (design options) and continuous variables (evaluation metrics). Our analysis suggests that the input position of adapters is the critical factor influencing the performance of downstream tasks. Then, we carefully study the choice of the input position, and we find that putting the input position after the cross-attention block can lead to the best performance, validated by additional visualization analyses. Finally, we provide a recipe for parameter-efficient tuning in diffusion models, which is comparable if not superior to the fully fine-tuned baseline (e.g., DreamBooth) with only 0.75 \% extra parameters, across various customized tasks.

Additionally, ggplot2 is a powerful visualization library that allows us to easily render the scatterplot and the regression line for a quick inspection. If you're interested in producing similar results in Python, the best way is to use the OLS ( Ordinary Least Squares) model from statsmodels. It has the closest output to the base R lm package producing a similar summary table. We'll start by importing the packages we need to run the model. Next, let's prepare our data.

In statistics, a test of significance is a method of reaching a conclusion to either reject or accept certain claims based on the data. In the case of regression analysis, it is used to determine whether an independent variable is significant in explaining the variance of the dependent variable. Since here we have only one predictor a T-test should be enough. However, in reality, our model is going to include a number of independent variables. This is where F-statistic comes into play.

This phenomenon is more prevalent in research results where the decision is solely based on the observed data. Observed data alone is not useful and reliable unless the sampling procedure is carefully designed, and strict precaution is taken to avoid sampling biases which might lurk into the data and makes result biased. You can find more details on the statistical biases here. In order to derive a scientific conclusion based on the data, we should equip ourselves to significance testing, a.k.a. Hypothesis testing is used to help you learn that the difference between two groups is not due to random chance.

ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) is a process to compare the means of more than two groups. It can also be used for comparing the means of two groups. Comparing the means between two groups only can be done using a hypothesis testing method such as a t-test. This article will focus on comparing the means of more than two groups using the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) method. This method breaks down the overall variability of a given continuous outcome into pieces. One way ANOVA is applicable where groups are defined based on the value of one factor.