Research

Relevant Links:

• Google Scholar: Alexander Volfovsky
• arXiv: Alexander Volfovsky

Working papers and publications:

• Neubrander, Reiter-Haas, Rochford, Allamong, Bail, Hillygus, Volfovsky. Can Platform Design Encourage Curiosity? Evidence from an Independent Social Media Experiment. ICWSM (accepted for 2027).
• Neubrander, Tierney, Volfovsky. The Confounder Trap: Treatment-Encoding Representations in Causal Inference with Text (2026).
• Parikh, Levin-Konigsberg, Tripuraneni, Madeka, Jordan, Foster, Perrault-Joncas, Volfovsky. Towards Optimal Estimators for Randomized Control Trials (2026).
• Parikh, Levin-Konigsberg, Perrault-Joncas, Volfovsky. Mind the Sim-to-Real Gap & Think Like a Scientist (2026).
• Gleich, Laber, Volfovsky. Adaptive Policy Learning Under Unknown Network Interference (2026).
• Husar, Volfovsky. DARTS: Targeting Prognostic Covariates in Budget-Constrained Sequential Experiments (2026).
• Liu, Volfovsky, Schnaidt, Garib, Laber. Optimal Data Integration and Adaptive Sampling for Efficient Treatment Effect Estimation (2026).
• Parikh, Levin-Konigsberg, Perrault-Joncas, Volfovsky. TEA-Time: Transporting Effects Across Time (2026).
• McCauley, Westover, Wynn, Sartipi, Turley, Akras, Colin, Webb, Struck, Kim, Cheng, Sun, Houle, Rudin, Volfovsky, Parikh, Fernandes, Zafar, Westover. CICADAS: A simulation-based framework for randomized trial emulation in critical-care seizure treatment. Intelligence-Based Medicine (2026).
• van Loon, Katta, Bail, Hillygus, Volfovsky. Designing Social Media to Promote Productive Political Dialogue. Scientific Reports (2026).
• Gleich, Laber, Volfovsky. Scalable Policy Maximization Under Network Interference. AISTATS (2026).
• Shen, Bail, Volfovsky. Enhancing Joint Ideal Point Estimation Strategies with Twitter Social Networks and Text Data. Network Science (2026).
• Jeong, Katta, Wang, Volfovsky, Dunn. Impact of daylight saving time on physical activity patterns. Nature Health (2026).
• Allamong, Trexler, Alqabandi, Tucker, Bail, Hillygus, Volfovsky. The Discomfort of Being Outnumbered Online: Evidence from a Dynamic Discussion Experiment (2026).
• Alqabandi, Tierney, Bail, Hillygus, Volfovsky. Experiments offering social media users the choice to avoid toxic political content. New Media & Society (2026).
• Tierney, Katta, Bail, Hillygus, Volfovsky. A Design-based Solution for Causal Inference with Text: Can a Language Model Be Too Large? (2025).
• Bu, Aiello, Volfovsky, Xu. Stochastic EM algorithm for partially observed stochastic epidemics with individual heterogeneity. Biostatistics (2025).
• Rochford, Lee, Qiu, Volfovsky, Hillygus, Bail. A Sociological Turing Test: Social Identity Cues Shape Who is Classified as Human Online (2025).
• Allamong, Bail, Hillygus, Volfovsky. The Causal Effects of Political Incivility in Social Media Discussions. American Journal of Political Science (accepted).
• Lanners, Rudin, Volfovsky, Parikh. Data Fusion for Partial Identification of Causal Effects. NeurIPS (2025).
• Weltz, Yoon, Zhang, Volfovsky, Laber. Reinforcement Learning for Respondent-Driven Sampling (2025).
• Tierney, Volfovsky. Bias and excess variance in election polling: a not-so-hidden Markov model. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society (2025).
• Toulis, Volfovsky, Airoldi. Estimating causal effects under non-individualistic treatments due to network entanglement. Biometrika (2025).
• Gupta, Orlandi, Chang, Wang, Morucci, Dey, Howell, Sun, Ghosal, Roy, Rudin, Volfovsky. dame-flame: A Python Package Providing Fast Interpretable Matching for Causal Inference. Journal of Statistical Software (2025).
• Parikh, Morucci, Orlandi, Roy, Rudin, Volfovsky. A Double Machine Learning Approach for Combining Experimental and Observational Studies. Observational Studies (2025).
• Parikh, Sun, Amerineni, Rosenthal, Volfovsky, Rudin, Westover, Zafar. How many patients do you need? Investigating trial designs for anti-seizure treatment in acute brain injury patients. Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology (2024).
• Weltz, Laber, Volfovsky. Hidden Population Estimation with Indirect Inference and Auxiliary Information. UAI (2024).
• Seale-Carlisle, Jain, Lee, Levenson, Ramprasad, Garrett, Roy, Rudin, Volfovsky. Evaluating Pre-trial Programs Using Interpretable Machine Learning Matching Algorithms for Causal Inference. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2024).
• Parikh, Lanners, Akras, Zafar, Westover, Rudin, Volfovsky. Safe and Interpretable Estimation of Optimal Treatment Regimes. AISTATS (2024).
• Katta, Parikh, Rudin, Volfovsky. Interpretable Causal Inference for Analyzing Wearable, Sensor, and Distributional Data. AISTATS (2024).
• Bail, Hillygus, Volfovsky, Allamong, Alqabandi, Jordan, Tierney, LaChapelle, Trexler, van Loon. Do We Need a Social Media Accelerator? (2023).
• Combs, Tierney, Guay, Merhout, Bail, Hillygus, Volfovsky. Reducing political polarization in the United States with a mobile chat platform. Nature Human Behaviour (2023).
• Combs, Tierney, Alqabandi, Cornell, Varela, Castro Araujo, Argyle, Bail, Volfovsky. Perceived gender and political persuasion: a social media field experiment during the 2020 US Democratic presidential primary election. Scientific Reports (2023).
• Mathews, Volfovsky. Community informed experimental design. Statistical Methods & Applications (2023).
• Volfovsky, Bail. Depolarization via anonymous mobile online communication. Nature Human Behaviour (2023).
• Weltz, Fiez, Volfovsky, Laber, Mason, Nassif, Jain. Experimental Designs for Heteroskedastic Variance. NeurIPS (2023).
• Belloni, Fang, Volfovsky. Neighborhood Adaptive Estimators for Causal Inference under Network Interference (2022; revised 2025).
• Lanners, Parikh, Volfovsky, Rudin, Page. Variable Importance Matching for Causal Inference. UAI (2023).
• Morucci, Rudin, Volfovsky. Matched Machine Learning: A Generalized Framework for Treatment Effect Inference With Learned Metrics (2023).
• Chen, Volfovsky. Identifying World Events in Dynamic International Relations Data Using a Latent Space Model (2023).
• Parikh, Hoffman, Sun, Zafar, Ge, Jing, Liu, Sun, Struck, Volfovsky, Rudin, Westover. Effects of Epileptiform Activity on Discharge Outcome in Critically Ill Patients in the USA: A Retrospective Cross-Sectional Study. Lancet Digital Health (2023).
• Parikh, Rudin, Volfovsky. MALTS: Matching After Learning to Stretch. Journal of Machine Learning Research (2022).
• Bu, Aiello, Xu, Volfovsky. Likelihood-based Inference for Partially Observed Epidemics on Dynamic Networks. Journal of the American Statistical Association (2022). SBSS Student Paper Award.
• Weltz, Volfovsky, Laber. Reinforcement learning methods in public health. Clinical Therapeutics (2022).
• Mathews, Volfovsky. Latent Community Adaptive Network Regression (2021).
• Orlandi, Murray, Linero, Volfovsky. Density Regression with Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (2021). Laplace SBSS Student Paper Award (2022).
• Tierney, Bail, Volfovsky. Author Clustering and Topic Estimation for Short Texts (2021; revised 2022).
• Tierney, Volfovsky. Sensitivity Analysis for Causal Mediation through Text: an Application to Political Polarization. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Causal Inference & Natural Language Processing (2021).
• Bu, Aiello, Volfovsky, Xu. Likelihood-based Inference For Partially Observed Stochastic Epidemics With Individual Heterogeneity (2021).
• Chauhan, Orlandi, Rajab, Bedeir, Volfovsky, Mokashi. Post-operative Outcomes in Infants Undergoing ABO Incompatible Heart Transplantation in the US. The Annals of Thoracic Surgery (2022).
• Ciccone, Zivich, Lodge, Zhu, Law, Miller, Taylor, Chung, Xu, Volfovsky, Beatty, Abernathy, King, Garrett, Markmann, Rebuli, Sellers, Weber, Reyes, Alavian, Juliano, Boyce, Aiello. SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Health Care Personnel and Their Household Contacts at a Tertiary Academic Medical Center: Protocol for a Longitudinal Cohort Study. JMIR Research Protocols (2021).
• Brinkley-Rubinstein, LeMasters, Nguyen, Nowotny, Cloud, Volfovsky. The association between intersystem prison transfers and COVID-19 incidence in a state prison system. PLOS One (2021).
• Zivich, Volfovsky, Moody, Aiello. Assortativity and Bias in Epidemiologic Studies of Contagious Outcomes: A Simulated Example in the Context of Vaccination. American Journal of Epidemiology (2021).
• Morucci, Orlandi, Roy, Rudin, Volfovsky. Adaptive Hyper-box Matching for Interpretable Individualized Treatment Effect Estimation. UAI (2020).
• Awan, Morucci, Orlandi, Roy, Rudin, Volfovsky. Almost-Matching-Exactly for Treatment Effect Estimation under Network Interference. AISTATS (2020).
• Bail, Guay, Maloney, Combs, Hillygus, Merhout, Freelon, Volfovsky. Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020).
• Parikh, Rudin, Volfovsky. An Application of Matching After Learning to Stretch (MALTS) to the ACIC 2018 Causal Inference Challenge Data. Observational Studies (2019).
• Mathews, Mayya, Volfovsky, Reeves. Gaussian Mixture Models for Stochastic Block Models with Non-Vanishing Noise. CAMSAP (2019).
• Reeves, Mayya, Volfovsky. The Geometry of Community Detection via the MMSE Matrix. ISIT (2019).
• Awan, Liu, Morucci, Roy, Rudin, Volfovsky. Interpretable Almost-Exact Matching With Instrumental Variables. UAI (2019).
• Dieng, Liu, Roy, Rudin, Volfovsky. Interpretable Almost-Exact Matching for Causal Inference. AISTATS (2019).
• Bu, Xu, Heller, Volfovsky. SMOGS: Social Network Metrics of Game Success. AISTATS (2019).
• Bail, Argyle, Brown, Bumpus, Chen, Hunzaker, Lee, Mann, Merhout, Volfovsky. Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018). SocArXiv.
• Wang, Morucci, Awan, Liu, Roy, Rudin, Volfovsky. FLAME: A Fast Large-scale Almost Matching Exactly Approach to Causal Inference. Journal of Machine Learning Research (2021).
• Jagadeesan, Pillai, Volfovsky. Designs for estimating the treatment effect in networks with interference. Annals of Statistics (2020).
• Hollenbach, Bojinov, Minhas, Metternich, Ward, Volfovsky. Multiple Imputation Using Gaussian Copulas. Sociological Methods & Research (2021).
• Ogburn, Volfovsky. Networks. Handbook of Big Data (2016).
• Basse, Volfovsky, Airoldi. Observational studies with unknown time of treatment (2016).
• Sussman, Volfovsky, Airoldi. Analyzing statistical and computational tradeoffs of estimation procedures (2015).
• Volfovsky, Airoldi, Rubin. Causal inference for ordinal outcomes. code
• Volfovsky, Airoldi. Sharp total variation bounds for finitely exchangeable arrays. Statistics & Probability Letters (2016).
• Volfovsky, Hoff. Testing for nodal dependence in relational data matrices. Journal of the American Statistical Association (2015).
• Volfovsky, Hoff. Hierarchical array priors for ANOVA decompositions of cross-classified data. The Annals of Applied Statistics (2014).
• Hoff, Fosdick, Volfovsky, Stovel. Likelihoods for fixed rank nomination networks. Network Science (2013).