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Machine Learning Predictions as Regression Covariates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2020

Christian Fong  and
Matthew Tyler Open the ORCID record for Matthew Tyler [Opens in a new window]
Christian Fong
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. Email: [email protected]
Matthew Tyler*
Affiliation:
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Email: [email protected]
*
Corresponding author Matthew Tyler
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Abstract

In text, images, merged surveys, voter files, and elsewhere, data sets are often missing important covariates, either because they are latent features of observations (such as sentiment in text) or because they are not collected (such as race in voter files). One promising approach for coping with this missing data is to find the true values of the missing covariates for a subset of the observations and then train a machine learning algorithm to predict the values of those covariates for the rest. However, plugging in these predictions without regard for prediction error renders regression analyses biased, inconsistent, and overconfident. We characterize the severity of the problem posed by prediction error, describe a procedure to avoid these inconsistencies under comparatively general assumptions, and demonstrate the performance of our estimators through simulations and a study of hostile political dialogue on the Internet. We provide software implementing our approach.

Keywords

machine learningclassificationinferenceinstrumental variables
Type
Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 467 - 484
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by Jeff Gill

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Supplementary material: Link

Fong and Tyler Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QQHBHY
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Fong and Tyler supplementary material

Online Appendix

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