Estimating the effect of ‘diverse’ team compositions on Dota 2 game outcomes using Inverse Probability Weighting

Commonly, when researchers are figuring out the effect of a putative cause, additional variables influence the cause and the effect. These are called confounders, and they obfuscate causal relationships. Inverse Probability Weighting is a method that can be applied to remove confounding and show a causal effect. This study aims to determine if...

Understanding Risk Extrapolation (REx) and when it finds Invariant Relationships

Generalizing models for new unknown datasets is a common problem in machine learning. Algorithms that perform well for test instances with the same distribution as their training dataset often perform severely on new datasets with a different distribution. This problem is caused by distributional shifts between the training of the model and...

Group Distributionally Robust Optimization for Solving Out-Of-Domain Generalization and Finding Causal Invariant Relationships

Out-of-Domain (OOD) generalization is a challenging problem in machine learning about learning a model from one or more domains and making the model perform well on an unseen domain. Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM), the standard machine learning method, suffers from learning spurious correlation in the training domain, therefore may perform...

Causal Inference in DotA 2 when estimated through randomized data

Strategy games could be considered as an amazing playground for using Causal inference methods. The complex nature of the data and the built-in randomization help with testing causal inference in a scenario where in reality it would be hard and expensive. Randomized data in coherence with causal inference is well documented and tested, but not...

Evaluating the Performance of the Model Selection with Average ECE and Naive Calibration in Out-of-Domain Generalization Problems for Binary Classifiers

Out-of-domain (OOD) generalization refers to learning a model from one or more different but related domain(s) that can be used in an unknown test domain. It is challenging for existing machine learning models. Several methods have been proposed to solve this problem, and multi-domain calibration is one of these methods. Model selection with the...

Finding the causal effect of picking Slark in the game of Dota 2 on the final match outcome based on in-match events using the front-door adjustment

The front-door adjustment is a causal inference method with which it is possible to determine the causal effect of applying a treatment given a setting which satisfies the front-door criterion. This involves having a mediator through which all the causal effect flows from treatment to outcome. The front-door adjustment adjusts for confounders...

Discovering the effect of hero choice on the outcome of a Dota 2 game

Dota 2 is one of the most popular MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games being played today. A Dota 2 match is played by two teams of 5 players. The main goal of the game is to destroy the opposing team’s Ancient tower, the team that manages to do so, wins the game. An essential part of a match is the hero selection phase before it starts....

Can Invariant Risk Minimization resist the temptation of learning spurious correlations?

Learning algorithms can perform poorly in unseen environments when they learn<br/>spurious correlations. This is known as the out-of-domain (OOD) generalization problem. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) is a method that attempts to solve this problem by learning invariant relationships. Motivating examples as well as counterexamples have been...