Goto

Collaborating Authors

 measurement error


2D Stability Selection: Design Jittering for Doubly Stable Feature Selection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study feature selection in high-dimensional regression under two distinct sources of instability: sampling variability and measurement error in the design matrix. Stability Selection addresses the former through sub-sampling and aggregation, but does not explicitly stress-test robustness to noisy predictors. We introduce doubly stable feature selection, a perturb-and-aggregate framework that targets features whose inclusion is stable both across randomization and across increasing levels of design noise. The method injects controlled additive noise into the design matrix, fits a fixed base selector such as the Lasso on the perturbed data, and aggregates selection frequencies. Sweeping over a grid of noise levels yields a stability path that summarizes robustness to measurement error while using the full sample size and isolating the effect of design perturbations. On the theory side, we show that classical model-selection conditions are preserved under sufficiently small perturbations, with a high-probability extension for Gaussian noise. Empirically, experiments on synthetic and real datasets show improved robustness compared with Stability Selection and standard base selectors.


Using Imperfect Surrogates for Downstream Inference: Design-based Supervised Learning for Social Science Applications of Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

In computational social science (CSS), researchers analyze documents to explain social and political phenomena. In most scenarios, CSS researchers first obtain labels for documents and then explain labels using interpretable regression analyses in the second step. One increasingly common way to annotate documents cheaply at scale is through large language models (LLMs). However, like other scalable ways of producing annotations, such surrogate labels are often imperfect and biased. We present a new algorithm for using imperfect annotation surrogates for downstream statistical analyses while guaranteeing statistical properties--like asymptotic unbiasedness and proper uncertainty quantification--which are fundamental to CSS research.


Bootstrapping with AI/ML-generated labels

arXiv.org Machine Learning

AI/ML methods are increasingly used in economics to generate binary variables (or labels) via classification algorithms. When these generated variables are included as covariates in regressions, even small misclassification errors can induce large biases in OLS estimators and invalidate standard inference. We study whether the bootstrap can correct this bias and deliver valid inference. We first show that a seemingly natural fixed-label bootstrap, which generates data using estimated labels but relies on a corrupted version in estimation, is generally invalid unless a strong independence condition between the latent true labels and other covariates holds. We then propose a coupled-label bootstrap that jointly resamples the true and imputed labels, and show it is valid without this condition. Two finite-sample adjustments further improve coverage: a variance correction for uncertainty in estimated misclassification rates and a Hessian rotation for near-singular designs. We illustrate the methods in simulations and apply them to investigate the relationship between wages and remote work status.


On Measuring Fairness in Generative Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recently, there has been increased interest in fair generative models. In this work, we conduct, for the first time, an in-depth study on fairness measurement, a critical component in gauging progress on fair generative models.


Causal Discovery in Linear Latent Variable Models Subject to Measurement Error

Neural Information Processing Systems

We focus on causal discovery in the presence of measurement error in linear systems where the mixing matrix, i.e., the matrix indicating the independent exogenous noise terms pertaining to the observed variables, is identified up to permutation and scaling of the columns. We demonstrate a somewhat surprising connection between this problem and causal discovery in the presence of unobserved parentless causes, in the sense that there is a mapping, given by the mixing matrix, between the underlying models to be inferred in these problems. Consequently, any identifiability result based on the mixing matrix for one model translates to an identifiability result for the other model. We characterize to what extent the causal models can be identified under a two-part faithfulness assumption. Under only the first part of the assumption (corresponding to the conventional definition of faithfulness), the structure can be learned up to the causal ordering among an ordered grouping of the variables but not all the edges across the groups can be identified. We further show that if both parts of the faithfulness assumption are imposed, the structure can be learned up to a more refined ordered grouping. As a result of this refinement, for the latent variable model with unobserved parentless causes, the structure can be identified. Based on our theoretical results, we propose causal structure learning methods for both models, and evaluate their performance on synthetic data.



Change-pointDetectionforSparseandDense FunctionalDatainGeneralDimensions

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of change-point detection and localisation for functional data sequentially observed on a generald-dimensional space, where we allow thefunctional curvestobeeither sparsely ordensely sampled.




Causal Imitation Learning Under Measurement Error and Distribution Shift

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study offline imitation learning (IL) when part of the decision-relevant state is observed only through noisy measurements and the distribution may change between training and deployment. Such settings induce spurious state-action correlations, so standard behavioral cloning (BC) -- whether conditioning on raw measurements or ignoring them -- can converge to systematically biased policies under distribution shift. We propose a general framework for IL under measurement error, inspired by explicitly modeling the causal relationships among the variables, yielding a target that retains a causal interpretation and is robust to distribution shift. Building on ideas from proximal causal inference, we introduce \texttt{CausIL}, which treats noisy state observations as proxy variables, and we provide identification conditions under which the target policy is recoverable from demonstrations without rewards or interactive expert queries. We develop estimators for both discrete and continuous state spaces; for continuous settings, we use an adversarial procedure over RKHS function classes to learn the required parameters. We evaluate \texttt{CausIL} on semi-simulated longitudinal data from the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2019 cohort and demonstrate improved robustness to distribution shift compared to BC baselines.