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Debiasing Machine Learning Predictions for Causal Inference Without Additional Ground Truth Data: "One Map, Many Trials" in Satellite-Driven Poverty Analysis
Chalmers Univ Technol, Sweden.
Univ Texas Austin, TX USA.
Linköping University, Department of Management and Engineering, The Institute for Analytical Sociology, IAS. Linköping University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
2026 (English)In: FORTIETH AAAI CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AAAI-26, VOL 40 NO 46, ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE , 2026, p. 39106-39115Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Machine learning models trained on Earth observation data, such as satellite imagery, have demonstrated significant promise in predicting household-level wealth indices, enabling the creation of high-resolution wealth maps that can be leveraged across multiple causal trials while addressing chronic data scarcity in global development research. However, because standard training objectives prioritize overall predictive accuracy, these predictions often suffer from shrinkage toward the mean, leading to attenuated estimates of causal treatment effects and limiting their utility in policy evaluations. Existing debiasing methods, such as Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI), can handle this attenuation bias but require additional fresh ground-truth data at the downstream stage of causal inference, which restricts their applicability in data-scarce environments. We introduce and evaluate two post-hoc correction methods-Linear Calibration Correction (LCC) and a Tweedie's correction approach-that substantially reduce shrinkage-induced prediction bias without relying on newly collected labeled data. LCC applies a simple linear transformation estimated on a held-out calibration split; Tweedie's method locally de-shrink predictions using density score estimates and a noise scale learned upstream. We provide practical diagnostics for when a correction is warranted and discuss practical limitations. Across analytical results, simulations, and experiments with Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data, both approaches reduce attenuation; Tweedie's correction yields nearly unbiased treatmenteffect estimates, enabling a "one map, many trials" paradigm. Although we demonstrate on EO-ML wealth mapping, the methods are not geospatial-specific: they apply to any setting where imputed outcomes are reused downstream (e.g., pollution indices, population density, or LLM-derived indicators). Code- https://aidevlab.org/unshrink Extended version- https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01341

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE , 2026. p. 39106-39115
Series
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ISSN 2159-5399
National Category
Bioinformatics (Computational Biology)
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-226979DOI: 10.1609/aaai.v40i46.41258ISI: 001769911400014Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105035096043OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-226979DiVA, id: diva2:2094854
Conference
40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, SINGAPORE, jan 20-27, 2026
Available from: 2026-08-24 Created: 2026-08-24 Last updated: 2026-08-24

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Daoud, Adel
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The Institute for Analytical Sociology, IASFaculty of Arts and Sciences
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