arXiv Machine Learning

Honesty in Causal Forests: When It Helps and When It Hurts

arXiv:2506. 13107v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal forests estimate how treatment effects vary across individuals, guiding personalized interventions in areas like marketing, operations, and public policy.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Splitting the Difference: Interpretable Causal Forests for Treatment Effect Heterogeneity and Bias

The paper introduces a new algorithm that uses decision trees and random forests to estimate individual treatment effects while providing interpretability. It modifies the standard random forest splitting criterion by combining a heterogeneity-focused criterion with a bias-correction criterion, enabling the model to handle observational studies with varying treatment propensities without separately estimating propensity scores. The resulting tree structure directly reveals which features drive treatment effect differences, and simulation studies show the method matches or surpasses existing approaches in prediction accuracy while improving interpretability.

By Nicolas Alexander Ihlo, Merle Behr
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

When Post-Processing Fairness Constraints Help and When They Harm: Evidence from Eight Cross-Domain Evaluations

The paper introduces FAPE, a four‑stage framework for evaluating the post‑processing fairness intervention ThresholdOptimizer across eight diverse domains, including criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and education. It reports that the intervention reduces disparity in most high‑disparity cases but can worsen fairness when baseline disparities are low, and that a single deployment‑time audit is unreliable without continuous monitoring and baseline‑disparity screening.

By Nithin Raghava Ramachandra Narla
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

The Role of Causality in Algorithmic Recourse

arXiv:2607. 28497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithmic recourse aims to provide individuals with actionable changes to improve their predicted outcomes in high-stakes classification settings, such as loan and mortgage applications.

By Srikanth Avasarala, Varun Gupta, Shahin Jabbari, Saber Salehkaleybar, Juba Ziani