VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Rachel Leah Childers
dblp:415/0713
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
0as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
1 paper |
Computational social science and digital humanities · 100% |
Topics — the 2 heaviest of 3, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Computational social science and digital humanities
causal inference |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Valid Inference with Imperfect Synthetic Data · NeurIPS 2025 |
Computational social science and digital humanities › causal inference
treatment effect estimation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Valid Inference with Imperfect Synthetic Data · NeurIPS 2025 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
large language model · 0.9generalized method of moments · 0.9
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Valid Inference with Imperfect Synthetic DataabstractPredictions and generations from large language models are increasingly being explored as an aid in limited data regimes, such as in computational social science and human subjects research.
While prior technical work has mainly explored the potential to use model-predicted labels for unlabeled data in a principled manner, there is increasing interest in using large language models to generate entirely new synthetic samples (e.g., synthetic simulations), such as in responses to surveys. However, it remains unclear
by what means practitioners can combine such data with real data
and yet produce statistically valid conclusions upon them.
In this paper, we introduce a new estimator based on generalized method of moments, providing a hyperparameter-free solution with strong theoretical guarantees to address this challenge. Intriguingly, we find that interactions between the moment residuals of synthetic data and those of real data (i.e., when they are predictive of each other) can greatly improve estimates of the target parameter.
We validate the finite-sample performance of our estimator across different tasks in computational social science applications, demonstrating large empirical gains. Yewon Byun, Zachary C. Lipton, Rachel Leah Childers, Bryan Wilder |
NeurIPS | 4 |