Keynote Speaker
Dr. Kosuke Imai
Professor of Political Science and Statistics, Harvard University
Dr. Kosuke Imai is Professor in the Department of Government and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. He is also an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science where his primary office is located. Before moving to Harvard in 2018, Imai taught at Princeton University for 15 years where he was the founding director of the Program in Statistics and Machine Learning. Imai specializes in the development of statistical methods and machine learning algorithms and their applications to social science research. His areas of expertise include causal inference, computational social science, and survey methodology. Imai leads the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology Project (ALARM) and is the author of Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2017). Outside of Harvard, Imai served as the President of the Society for Political Methodology from 2017 to 2019. He is also Professor of Visiting Status in the Graduate Schools of Law and Politics at The University of Tokyo.
Experimental Evaluation of Algorithm-Assisted Human Decision-Making: Application to Pretrial Public Safety Assessment
Despite an increasing reliance on fully-automated algorithmic decision-making in our day-to-day lives, human beings still make highly consequential decisions. As frequently seen in business, healthcare, and public policy, recommendations produced by algorithms are provided to human decision-makers to guide their decisions. While there exists a fast-growing literature evaluating the bias and fairness of such algorithmic recommendations, an overlooked question is whether they help humans make better decisions. We develop a general statistical methodology for experimentally evaluating the causal impacts of algorithmic recommendations on human decisions. We also show how to examine whether algorithmic recommendations improve the fairness of human decisions and derive the optimal decision rules under various settings. We apply the proposed methodology to preliminary data from the first-ever randomized controlled trial that evaluates the pretrial Public Safety Assessment (PSA) in the criminal justice system. A goal of the PSA is to help judges decide which arrested individuals should be released. On the basis of the preliminary data available, we find that providing the PSA to the judge has little overall impact on the judge’s decisions and subsequent arrestee behavior. Our analysis, however, yields some potentially suggestive evidence that the PSA may help avoid unnecessarily harsh decisions for female arrestees regardless of their risk levels while it encourages the judge to make stricter decisions for male arrestees who are deemed to be risky. In terms of fairness, the PSA appears to increase an existing gender difference while having little effect on any racial differences in judges’ decisions. Finally, we find that the PSA’s recommendations might be unnecessarily severe unless the cost of a new crime is sufficiently high.
Michigan Speaker
Dr. Walter Dempsey
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Assistant Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Dr. Walter Dempsey is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and an Assistant Research Professor in the d3lab located in the Institute of Social Research. His research focuses on Statistical Methods for Digital and Mobile Health. His current work involves three complementary research themes: (1) experimental design and data analytic methods to inform multi-stage decision making in health; (2) statistical modeling of complex longitudinal and survival data; and (3) statistical modeling of complex relational structures such as interaction networks.
Using data to inform just-in-time adaptive interventions in mobile health: promise, pitfalls, and perspective
Twin revolutions in wearable technologies and smartphone-delivered digital health interventions have significantly expanded the accessibility and uptake of mobile health (mHealth) interventions in multiple domains of health sciences. Sequentially randomized experiments called micro-randomized trials (MRTs) have grown in popularity as a means to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of mHealth intervention components. Data collected in MRTs allow health scientists to answer important scientific questions about how intervention effectiveness may change over time or be moderated by individual characteristics, time-varying context, or past responses. In this talk we discuss our work on a variety of mobile health interventions. Specifically, we will highlight the promise and pitfalls of data-driven optimization of just-in-time adaptive interventions.
