The presentation will revisit some of the conceptual and statistical foundations of psychometric measurement theory and factor analysis, specifically addressing the questions: (i) What happens to “factors” when they causally affect one another?, (ii) Is an underlying univariate latent variable a reasonable model for psycho-social constructs?, (iii) What are the testable empirical implications of such a model? and (iv) What alternative interpretations of analyses with constructed measures might be possible?

The presentation will be based upon the following three preprints:...

The rise of machine learning has fundamentally altered decision making: rather than being made solely by people, many important decisions are now made through an “algorithm-in-the-loop” process where machine learning models inform people. Yet insufficient research has considered how the interactions between people and models actually influence human decision making. In this talk, I’ll discuss results from a set of controlled experiments on algorithm-in-the-loop human decision making in two contexts (pretrial release and financial lending). For example, when presented with algorithmic...

A standard assumption for causal inference from observational data is that one has measured a sufficiently rich set of covariates to ensure that within covariates strata, subjects are exchangeable across observed treatment values. Skepticism about the exchangeability assumption in observational studies is often warranted because it hinges on one's ability to accurately measure covariates capturing all potential sources of confounding. Realistically, confounding mechanisms can rarely if ever, be learned with certainty from measured covariates. One can therefore only ever hope that...