Public service programs often allocate limited resources under uncertainty about their benefits, creating a need for randomization to support credible evaluation. In practice, however, applicants commonly enter waitlists where resources are prioritized toward individuals judged to have higher need through tiered priority queues, making direct randomization difficult. Motivated by this, we develop an experimental design framework for learning treatment effects while treating those most in need where incoming applicants are randomized into priority queues based on their assessed risk scores. Treatments are then provided across queues in priority order and first-in-first-out within queue as budget becomes available. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we characterize what causal effects are identified under this priority-queue allocation. When arrivals are exogenous, treatments are conditionally randomized, and hence standard estimands are identified; when arrivals are endogenous, queue randomization instead provides an instrument for treatment, identifying local treatment effects induced by the queuing process. Second, we develop optimized queue-assignment designs that trade off statistical efficiency against prioritizing higher-need applicants. We show in the process that, despite dependence in treatment assignments induced by the design, usual iid efficiency bounds remain well-justified design objectives. We illustrate the proposed designs using data from a housing allocation program in a large U.S. county.

Nonlinear vector autoregression (NVAR) and reservoir computing (RC) have shown promise in forecasting chaotic dynamical systems, such as the Lorenz-63 model and El Nino-Southern Oscillation. However, their reliance on fixed nonlinear transformations - polynomial expansions in NVAR or random feature maps in RC - limits their adaptability to high noise or complex real-world data. Furthermore, these methods also exhibit poor scalability in high-dimensional settings due to costly matrix inversion during optimization. We propose a data-adaptive NVAR model that combines delay-embedded linear inputs with features generated by a shallow, trainable multilayer perceptron (MLP). Unlike standard NVAR and RC models, the MLP and linear readout are jointly trained using gradient-based optimization, enabling the model to learn data-driven nonlinearities, while preserving a simple readout structure and improving scalability. Initial experiments across multiple chaotic systems, tested under noise-free and synthetically noisy conditions, showed that the adaptive model outperformed in predictive accuracy the standard NVAR, a leaky echo state network (ESN) - the most common RC model - and a hybrid ESN, thereby showing robust forecasting under noisy conditions.

Machine learning techniques have recently been of great interest for solving differential equations. Training these models is classically a data-fitting task, but knowledge of the expression of the differential equation can be used to supplement the training objective, leading to the development of physics-informed scientific machine learning. In this article, we focus on one class of models called nonlinear vector autoregression (NVAR) to solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Motivated by connections to numerical integration and physics-informed neural networks, we explicitly derive the physics-informed NVAR (piNVAR) which enforces the right-hand side of the underlying differential equation regardless of NVAR construction. Because NVAR and piNVAR completely share their learned parameters, we propose an augmented procedure to jointly train the two models. Then, using both data-driven and ODE-driven metrics, we evaluate the ability of the piNVAR model to predict solutions to various ODE systems, such as the undamped spring, a Lotka-Volterra predator-prey nonlinear model, and the chaotic Lorenz system.

Economics and social science research often require analyzing datasets of sensitive personal information at fine granularity, with models fit to small subsets of the data. Unfortunately, such fine-grained analysis can easily reveal sensitive individual information. We study algorithms for simple linear regression that satisfy differential privacy, a constraint which guarantees that an algorithm's output reveals little about any individual input data record, even to an attacker with arbitrary side information about the dataset. We consider the design of differentially private algorithms for simple linear regression for small datasets, with tens to hundreds of datapoints, which is a particularly challenging regime for differential privacy. Focusing on a particular application to small-area analysis in economics research, we study the performance of a spectrum of algorithms we adapt to the setting. We identify key factors that affect their performance, showing through a range of experiments that algorithms based on robust estimators (in particular, the Theil-Sen estimator) perform well on the smallest datasets, but that other more standard algorithms do better as the dataset size increases.

Experimental measurements (figure 1) reveal reduction by a factor of 2.5 for the 8-queens puzzle (factor of 8.7 for 16 queens) in T, the number of pair-tests performed before finding a solution (i.e., first solution). " seconds, net speedup is by a factor of 2.0 and 6.0 for 8-and 16-queens, respectively. The speedup can be attributed to the elimination of almost all redundant tests otherwise recomputed in many parts of the search tree, as indicated in figure 2, which shows the mean number of times, D, an arbitrary pair-test is executed. If D 1 then all tests are distinct (no recomputatiOn). Note that each data point in the figures represents the mean over 30 or 70 problem instances that differ as follows: instead of instantiating queen 3, say, on square (3,1), then on (3,2),..., then (3,8), these 8 squares are ordered randomly.