A key strategy in societal adaptation to climate change is using alert systems to prompt preventative action and reduce the adverse health impacts of extreme heat events. This paper implements and evaluates reinforcement learning (RL) as a tool to optimize the effectiveness of such systems. Our contributions are threefold. First, we introduce a new publicly available RL environment enabling the evaluation of the effectiveness of heat alert policies to reduce heat-related hospitalizations. The rewards model is trained from a comprehensive dataset of historical weather, Medicare health records, and socioeconomic/geographic features. We use scalable Bayesian techniques tailored to the low-signal effects and spatial heterogeneity present in the data. The transition model uses real historical weather patterns enriched by a data augmentation mechanism based on climate region similarity. Second, we use this environment to evaluate standard RL algorithms in the context of heat alert issuance. Our analysis shows that policy constraints are needed to improve RL's initially poor performance. Third, a post-hoc contrastive analysis provides insight into scenarios where our modified heat alert-RL policies yield significant gains/losses over the current National Weather Service alert policy in the United States.

Topological Deep Learning (TDL) has emerged as a paradigm to process and learn from signals defined on higher-order combinatorial topological spaces, such as simplicial or cell complexes. Although many complex systems have an asymmetric relational structure, most TDL models forcibly symmetrize these relationships. In this paper, we first introduce a novel notion of higher-order directionality and we then design Directed Simplicial Neural Networks (Dir-SNNs) based on it. Dir-SNNs are message-passing networks operating on directed simplicial complexes able to leverage directed and possibly asymmetric interactions among the simplices. To our knowledge, this is the first TDL model using a notion of higher-order directionality. We theoretically and empirically prove that Dir-SNNs are more expressive than their directed graph counterpart in distinguishing non-isomorphic directed graphs. Experiments on a synthetic source localization task demonstrate that Dir-SNNs outperform undirected SNNs when the underlying complex is directed, and perform comparably when the underlying complex is undirected.

Graph neural networks excel at modeling pairwise interactions, but they cannot flexibly accommodate higher-order interactions and features. Topological deep learning (TDL) has emerged recently as a promising tool for addressing this issue. TDL enables the principled modeling of arbitrary multi-way, hierarchical higher-order interactions by operating on combinatorial topological spaces, such as simplicial or cell complexes, instead of graphs. However, little is known about how to leverage geometric features such as positions and velocities for TDL. This paper introduces E(n)-Equivariant Topological Neural Networks (ETNNs), which are E(n)-equivariant message-passing networks operating on combinatorial complexes, formal objects unifying graphs, hypergraphs, simplicial, path, and cell complexes. ETNNs incorporate geometric node features while respecting rotation, reflection, and translation equivariance. Moreover, being TDL models, ETNNs are natively ready for settings with heterogeneous interactions. We provide a theoretical analysis to show the improved expressiveness of ETNNs over architectures for geometric graphs. We also show how E(n)-equivariant variants of TDL models can be directly derived from our framework. The broad applicability of ETNNs is demonstrated through two tasks of vastly different scales: i) molecular property prediction on the QM9 benchmark and ii) land-use regression for hyper-local estimation of air pollution with multi-resolution irregular geospatial data. The results indicate that ETNNs are an effective tool for learning from diverse types of richly structured data, as they match or surpass SotA equivariant TDL models with a significantly smaller computational burden, thus highlighting the benefits of a principled geometric inductive bias. Our implementation of ETNNs can be found at https://github.com/NSAPH-Projects/topological-equivariant-networks.

Spatial confounding poses a significant challenge in scientific studies involving spatial data, where unobserved spatial variables can influence both treatment and outcome, possibly leading to spurious associations. To address this problem, we introduce SpaCE: The Spatial Confounding Environment, the first toolkit to provide realistic benchmark datasets and tools for systematically evaluating causal inference methods designed to alleviate spatial confounding. Each dataset includes training data, true counterfactuals, a spatial graph with coordinates, and smoothness and confounding scores characterizing the effect of a missing spatial confounder. It also includes realistic semi-synthetic outcomes and counterfactuals, generated using state-of-the-art machine learning ensembles, following best practices for causal inference benchmarks. The datasets cover real treatment and covariates from diverse domains, including climate, health and social sciences. SpaCE facilitates an automated end-to-end pipeline, simplifying data loading, experimental setup, and evaluating machine learning and causal inference models. The SpaCE project provides several dozens of datasets of diverse sizes and spatial complexity. It is publicly available as a Python package, encouraging community feedback and contributions.

A fundamental task in causal inference is estimating the effect of a distribution shift in the treatment variable.We refer to this problem as shift-response function (SRF) estimation.Existing neural network methods for causal inference lack theoretical guarantees and practical implementations for SRF estimation.In this paper, we introduce Targeted Regularization for Exposure Shifts with Neural Networks (tresnet), a method to estimate SRFs with robustness and efficiency guarantees.Our contributions are twofold.First, we propose a targeted regularization loss for neural networks with theoretical properties that ensure double robustness and asymptotic efficiency specific to SRF estimation.Second, we extend targeted regularization to support loss functions from the exponential family to accommodate non-continuous outcome distributions (e.g., discrete counts).We conduct benchmark experiments demonstrating tresnet's broad applicability and competitiveness.We then apply our method to a key policy question in public health to estimate the causal effect of revising the US National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for PM 2.5 from 12 𝜇𝑔/𝑚 3 to 9 𝜇𝑔/𝑚 3 .This change has been recently proposed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).Our goal is to estimate the reduction in deaths that would result from this anticipated revision using data consisting of 68 million individuals across the U.S.

Variable importance (VI) tools describe how much covariates contribute to a prediction model's accuracy. However, important variables for one well-performing model (for example, a linear model $f(\mathbf{x})=\mathbf{x}^{T}\beta$ with a fixed coefficient vector $\beta$) may be unimportant for another model. In this paper, we propose model class reliance (MCR) as the range of VI values across all well-performing model in a prespecified class. Thus, MCR gives a more comprehensive description of importance by accounting for the fact that many prediction models, possibly of different parametric forms, may fit the data well. In the process of deriving MCR, we show several informative results for permutation-based VI estimates, based on the VI measures used in Random Forests. Specifically, we derive connections between permutation importance estimates for a single prediction model, U-statistics, conditional variable importance, conditional causal effects, and linear model coefficients. We then give probabilistic bounds for MCR, using a novel, generalizable technique. We apply MCR to a public data set of Broward County criminal records to study the reliance of recidivism prediction models on sex and race. In this application, MCR can be used to help inform VI for unknown, proprietary models.

We propose a Bayesian model selection (BMS) boundary detection procedure using non-local prior distributions for a sequence of data with multiple systematic mean changes. By using the non-local priors in the BMS framework, the BMS method can effectively suppress the non-boundary spike points with large instantaneous changes. Further, we speedup the algorithm by reducing the multiple change points to a series of single change point detection problems. We establish the consistency of the estimated number and locations of the change points under various prior distributions. From both theoretical and numerical perspectives, we show that the non-local inverse moment prior leads to the fastest convergence rate in identifying the true change points on the boundaries. Extensive simulation studies are conducted to compare the BMS with existing methods, and our method is illustrated with application to the magnetic resonance imaging guided radiation therapy data.

Large epidemiological studies have shown that exposure to air pollution, in particular fine particulate matter (PM2.5), is harmful to human health. However, air pollution monitors which measure air pollutant concentrations are sparsely located, excluding large portions of the population, in particular non-urban populations, from studies. One approach to resolving this issue has been developing models to predict local PM2.5, NO2, and ozone in unmonitored areas based on satellite, meteorological, and land use data. These prediction models are typically developed using large amounts of input data and are highly computationally intensive. We have developed a flexible R package that allows environmental health researchers to design and train spatio-temporal models capable of predicting multiple pollutants, including PM2.5. We utilize H2O, an open source big data R platform, to achieve both performance and scalability when used in conjunction with cloud or cluster computing systems.

Based on non-local prior distributions, we propose a Bayesian model selection (BMS) procedure for boundary detection in a sequence of data with multiple systematic mean changes. The BMS method can effectively suppress the non-boundary spike points with large instantaneous changes. We speed up the algorithm by reducing the multiple change points to a series of single change point detection problems. We establish the consistency of the estimated number and locations of the change points under various prior distributions. Extensive simulation studies are conducted to compare the BMS with existing methods, and our approach is illustrated with application to the magnetic resonance imaging guided radiation therapy data.