5,034 research outputs found
Inference with interference between units in an fMRI experiment of motor inhibition
An experimental unit is an opportunity to randomly apply or withhold a
treatment. There is interference between units if the application of the
treatment to one unit may also affect other units. In cognitive neuroscience, a
common form of experiment presents a sequence of stimuli or requests for
cognitive activity at random to each experimental subject and measures
biological aspects of brain activity that follow these requests. Each subject
is then many experimental units, and interference between units within an
experimental subject is likely, in part because the stimuli follow one another
quickly and in part because human subjects learn or become experienced or
primed or bored as the experiment proceeds. We use a recent fMRI experiment
concerned with the inhibition of motor activity to illustrate and further
develop recently proposed methodology for inference in the presence of
interference. A simulation evaluates the power of competing procedures.Comment: Published by Journal of the American Statistical Association at
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2012.655954 . R package
cin (Causal Inference for Neuroscience) implementing the proposed method is
freely available on CRAN at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ci
Conductivity of Metallic Si:B near the Metal-Insulator Transition: Comparison between Unstressed and Uniaxially Stressed Samples
The low-temperature dc conductivities of barely metallic samples of p-type
Si:B are compared for a series of samples with different dopant concentrations,
n, in the absence of stress (cubic symmetry), and for a single sample driven
from the metallic into the insulating phase by uniaxial compression, S. For all
values of temperature and stress, the conductivity of the stressed sample
collapses onto a single universal scaling curve. The scaling fit indicates that
the conductivity of si:B is proportional to the square-root of T in the
critical range. Our data yield a critical conductivity exponent of 1.6,
considerably larger than the value reported in earlier experiments where the
transition was crossed by varying the dopant concentration. The larger exponent
is based on data in a narrow range of stress near the critical value within
which scaling holds. We show explicitly that the temperature dependences of the
conductivity of stressed and unstressed Si:B are different, suggesting that a
direct comparison of the critical behavior and critical exponents for stress-
tuned and concentration-tuned transitions may not be warranted
Positive-Operator-Valued Time Observable in Quantum Mechanics
We examine the longstanding problem of introducing a time observable in
Quantum Mechanics; using the formalism of positive-operator-valued measures we
show how to define such an observable in a natural way and we discuss some
consequences.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX, no figures. Some minor changes, expanded the
bibliography (now it is bigger than the one in the published version),
changed the title and the style for publication on the International Journal
of Theoretical Physic
Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making: An Excursion Through the Lens of Causality
As virtually all aspects of our lives are increasingly impacted by
algorithmic decision making systems, it is incumbent upon us as a society to
ensure such systems do not become instruments of unfair discrimination on the
basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. We consider the problem of
determining whether the decisions made by such systems are discriminatory,
through the lens of causal models. We introduce two definitions of group
fairness grounded in causality: fair on average causal effect (FACE), and fair
on average causal effect on the treated (FACT). We use the Rubin-Neyman
potential outcomes framework for the analysis of cause-effect relationships to
robustly estimate FACE and FACT. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our
proposed approach on synthetic data. Our analyses of two real-world data sets,
the Adult income data set from the UCI repository (with gender as the protected
attribute), and the NYC Stop and Frisk data set (with race as the protected
attribute), show that the evidence of discrimination obtained by FACE and FACT,
or lack thereof, is often in agreement with the findings from other studies. We
further show that FACT, being somewhat more nuanced compared to FACE, can yield
findings of discrimination that differ from those obtained using FACE.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables.To appear in Proceedings of the
International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 201
Dielectric catastrophe at the Mott transition
We study the Mott transition as a function of interaction strength in the
half-filled Hubbard chain with next-nearest-neighbor hopping t' by calculating
the response to an external electric field using the Density Matrix
Renormalization Group. The electric susceptibility chi diverges when
approaching the critical point from the insulating side. We show that the
correlation length xi characterizing this transition is directly proportional
to fluctuations of the polarization and that chi ~ xi^2. The critical behavior
shows that the transition is infinite-order for all t', whether or not a spin
gap is present, and that hyperscaling holds.Comment: 4 pages, 4 eps figures, REVTe
Metal-insulator transition in a doped semiconductor
Millikelvin measurements of the conductivity as a function of donor density and uniaxial stress in bulk samples of phosphorus-doped silicon establish that the transition from metal to insulator is continuous, but sharper than predicted by scaling theories of localization. The divergence of the dielectric susceptibility as the transition is approached from below also points out problems in current scaling theories. The temperature dependence of the conductivity and the magnetoresistance in the metal indicate the importance of Coulomb interactions in describing the behavior of disordered systems
Estimation of Treatment Effect of Asthma Case Management Using Propensity Score Methods
Ising Spin Glass in a Transverse Magnetic Field
We study the three-dimensional quantum Ising spin glass in a transverse
magnetic field following the evolution of the bond probability distribution
under Renormalisation Group transformations. The phase diagram (critical
temperature {\em vs} transverse field ) we obtain shows a finite
slope near , in contrast with the infinite slope for the pure case. Our
results compare very well with the experimental data recently obtained for the
dipolar Ising spin glass LiHoYF, in a transverse field.
This indicates that this system is more apropriately described by a model with
short range interactions than by an equivalent Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model in
a transverse field.Comment: 7 pages, RevTeX3, Nota Cientifica PUC-Rio 23/9
Anderson-Mott transition as a quantum glass problem
We combine a recent mapping of the Anderson-Mott metal-insulator transition
on a random-field problem with scaling concepts for random-field magnets to
argue that disordered electrons near an Anderson-Mott transition show
glass-like behavior. We first discuss attempts to interpret experimental
results in terms of a conventional scaling picture, and argue that some of the
difficulties encountered point towards a glassy nature of the electrons. We
then develop a general scaling theory for a quantum glass, and discuss critical
properties of both thermodynamic and transport variables in terms of it. Our
most important conclusions are that for a correct interpretation of experiments
one must distinguish between self-averaging and non-self averaging observables,
and that dynamical or temperature scaling is not of power-law type but rather
activated, i.e. given by a generalized Vogel-Fulcher law. Recent mutually
contradicting experimental results on Si:P are discussed in the light of this,
and new experiments are proposed to test the predictions of our quantum glass
scaling theory.Comment: 25pp, REVTeX, 5 ps figs, final version as publishe
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