410 research outputs found
Unfair Utilities and First Steps Towards Improving Them
Many fairness criteria constrain the policy or choice of predictors. In this
work, we propose a different framework for thinking about fairness: Instead of
constraining the policy or choice of predictors, we consider which utility a
policy is optimizing for. We define value of information fairness and propose
to not use utilities that do not satisfy this criterion. We describe how to
modify a utility to satisfy this fairness criterion and discuss the
consequences this might have on the corresponding optimal policies.Comment: 20 page
Bayesian Triplet Loss: Uncertainty Quantification in Image Retrieval
Uncertainty quantification in image retrieval is crucial for downstream
decisions, yet it remains a challenging and largely unexplored problem. Current
methods for estimating uncertainties are poorly calibrated, computationally
expensive, or based on heuristics. We present a new method that views image
embeddings as stochastic features rather than deterministic features. Our two
main contributions are (1) a likelihood that matches the triplet constraint and
that evaluates the probability of an anchor being closer to a positive than a
negative; and (2) a prior over the feature space that justifies the
conventional l2 normalization. To ensure computational efficiency, we derive a
variational approximation of the posterior, called the Bayesian triplet loss,
that produces state-of-the-art uncertainty estimates and matches the predictive
performance of current state-of-the-art methods
Monitoring Public Behavior During a Pandemic Using Surveys: Proof-of-Concept Via Epidemic Modelling
Implementing a lockdown for disease mitigation is a balancing act:
Non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce disease transmission significantly,
but interventions also have considerable societal costs. Therefore,
decision-makers need near real-time information to calibrate the level of
restrictions. We fielded daily surveys in Denmark during the second wave of the
COVID-19 pandemic to monitor public response to the announced lockdown. A key
question asked respondents to state their number of close contacts within the
past 24 hours. Here, we establish a link between survey data, mobility data,
and, hospitalizations via epidemic modeling. Using Bayesian analysis, we then
evaluate the usefulness of survey responses as a tool to monitor the effects of
lockdown and then compare the predictive performance to that of mobility data.
We find that, unlike mobility, self-reported contacts track the immediate
behavioral response after the lockdown's announcement, weeks before the
lockdown's national implementation. The survey data agree with the inferred
effective reproduction number and their addition to the model results in
greater improvement of predictive performance than mobility data. A detailed
analysis of contact types indicates that disease transmission is driven by
friends and strangers, whereas contacts to colleagues and family members
(outside the household) only played a minor role despite Christmas holidays.
Our work shows that an announcement of non-pharmaceutical interventions can
lead to immediate behavioral responses, weeks before the actual implementation.
Specifically, we find that self-reported contacts capture this early signal and
thus qualify as a reliable, non-privacy invasive monitoring tool to track the
implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions
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