• Explainability and Analysis of Variance (Zijun Gao, USC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: Existing tools for explaining complex models and systems are associational rather than causal and do not provide mechanistic understanding. We propose a new notion called counterfactual explainability for causal attribution that is motivated by the concept of genetic heritability in twin studies. Counterfactual explainability extends methods for global sensitivity analysis (including the functional analysis […]

  • Structure-Preserving Discretizations for Fokker–Planck Equations via the Energy Dissipation Law (Satish Chandran, UCR)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: We present a new approach for deriving structure-preserving numerical discretizations of Fokker-Planck equations by establishing a connection between the Fokker-Planck equation and its semi-discrete master equation at the level of the energy-dissipation law. We determine the transition rate in the master equation via the detailed balance condition and the spatial discretization of the continuous […]

  • An Odd Estimator for Shapley Values (Teal Witter, CMC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: The Shapley value is a ubiquitous framework for attribution in machine learning, encompassing feature importance, data valuation, and causal inference. However, its exact computation is generally intractable, necessitating efficient approximation methods. While the most effective and popular estimators leverage the paired sampling heuristic to reduce estimation error, the theoretical mechanism driving this improvement has […]

  • Extremal Eigenvalues of Weighted Steklov Problems (Chiu-Yen Kao, CMC)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: We study the optimization of Steklov eigenvalues with respect to a boundary density function ρ on a bounded Lipschitz domain. We investigate the minimization and maximization of a Steklov […]

  • The Secret Life of Turbulent Fluids (Vincent Martinez, Caltech)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: Turbulence influences our lives in a multitude of ways, ranging from the mundane (when we stir milk into our coffee) to the spectacular (the formation of galaxies). It is […]

  • If a Statistical Model Predicts That Common Events Should Occur Only Once in 10,000 Elections, Maybe it’s the Wrong Model (Danny Ebanks, Cal Tech)

    Emmy Noether Room, Estella 1021, Pomona College, 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Political scientists forecast elections, not primarily to satisfy public interest, but to validate statistical models used for estimating quantities of scholarly interest. Although scholars have learned a great deal from […]