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Causal Decomposition Analysis with Synergistic Interventions: A Triply-Robust Machine Learning Approach to Addressing Multiple Dimensions of Social Disparities

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Educational disparities are rooted in and perpetuate social inequalities across multiple dimensions such as race, socioeconomic status, and geography. To reduce disparities, most intervention strategies focus on a single domain and frequently evaluate their effectiveness by using causal decomposition analysis. However, a growing body of research suggests that single-domain interventions may be insufficient for individuals marginalized on multiple fronts. While interventions across multiple domains are increasingly proposed, there is limited guidance on appropriate methods for evaluating their effectiveness. To address this gap, we develop an extended causal decomposition analysis that simultaneously targets multiple causally ordered intervening factors, allowing for the assessment of their synergistic effects. These scenarios often involve challenges related to model misspecification due to complex interactions among group categories, intervening factors, and their confounders with the outcome. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a triply robust estimator that leverages machine learning techniques to address potential model misspecification. We apply our method to a cohort of students from the High School Longitudinal Study, focusing on math achievement disparities between Black, Hispanic, and White high schoolers. Specifically, we examine how two sequential interventions - equalizing the proportion of students who attend high-performing schools and equalizing enrollment in Algebra I by 9th grade across racial groups - may reduce these disparities.


Improving Isochronous Machine Translation with Target Factors and Auxiliary Counters

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To translate speech for automatic dubbing, machine translation needs to be isochronous, i.e. translated speech needs to be aligned with the source in terms of speech durations. We introduce target factors in a transformer model to predict durations jointly with target language phoneme sequences. We also introduce auxiliary counters to help the decoder to keep track of the timing information while generating target phonemes. We show that our model improves translation quality and isochrony compared to previous work where the translation model is instead trained to predict interleaved sequences of phonemes and durations.