arXiv subjects

Adolfo De Unánue

Publications and source records attributed to Adolfo De Unánue.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Machine Learning as Performative Materialist Practice: Thirteen Theses on the Epistemology, Methodology, and Politics of Applied ML

Machine learning practice in institutional decision-support contexts -- government, public policy, public health, criminal justice, resource allocation -- rests on a set of largely unexamined epistemological commitments inherited from classical statistics and computer science: that models represent stable regularities, that validation can be context-free, that performance metrics are politically neutral, and that feature importance reveals system structure. This paper challenges these commitments through a unified framework of performative materialist ML, articulated as thirteen theses. Drawing on Pickering's cybernetic ontology, the performativity literature from economic sociology (Callon, MacKenzie), Simon's bounded rationality, the formalization of performative prediction (Perdomo et al., 2020), and fifteen years of applied ML experience in government and public policy, we argue that: (1) ML models are best understood not as truth-seeking representations but as temporally situated compressions that function as instruments of intervention; (2) the full data product is a complex adaptive system that coevolves with its target and navigates a multi-objective space no single algorithm can optimize; (3) validity is fundamentally performative, measured by effects in the world rather than formal properties of the model; (4) the choices embedded in objective functions, fairness criteria, and resource thresholds are political decisions belonging to stakeholders, not technicians. We show how these theses unify several practical prescriptions -- temporal cross-validation, precision and recall at k, pipeline-aware fairness auditing, satisficing over optimizing -- as consequences of a coherent materialist epistemology rather than isolated best practices

cs.CY↗

arXiv2017

Applying Machine Learning Methods to Enhance the Distribution of Social Services in Mexico

The Government of Mexico's social development agency, SEDESOL, is responsible for the administration of social services and has the mission of lifting Mexican families out of poverty. One key challenge they face is matching people who have social service needs with the services SEDESOL can provide accurately and efficiently. In this work we describe two specific applications implemented in collaboration with SEDESOL to enhance their distribution of social services. The first problem relates to systematic underreporting on applications for social services, which makes it difficult to identify where to prioritize outreach. Responding that five people reside in a home when only three do is a type of underreporting that could occur while a social worker conducts a home survey with a family to determine their eligibility for services. The second involves approximating multidimensional poverty profiles across households. That is, can we characterize different types of vulnerabilities -- for example, food insecurity and lack of health services -- faced by those in poverty? We detail the problem context, available data, our machine learning formulation, experimental results, and effective feature sets. As far as we are aware this is the first time government data of this scale has been used to combat poverty within Mexico. We found that survey data alone can suggest potential underreporting. Further, we found geographic features useful for housing and service related indicators and transactional data informative for other dimensions of poverty. The results from our machine learning system for estimating poverty profiles will directly help better match 7.4 million individuals to social programs.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2011

Multiple quantum collapse of the inflaton field and its implications on the birth of cosmic structure

The standard inflationary account for the origin of cosmic structure is, without a doubt, extremely successful. However, it is not fully satisfactory as has been argued in [A. Perez, H. Sahlmann, and D. Sudarsky, Class. Quantum Grav., 23, 2317, (2006), arXiv:gr-qc/0508100]. The central point is that, in the standard accounts, the inhomogeneity and anisotropy of our universe seems to emerge, unexplained, from an exactly homogeneous and isotropic initial state through processes that do not break those symmetries. The proposal made there to address this shortcoming calls for a dynamical and self-induced quantum collapse of the original homogeneous and isotropic state of the inflaton. In this article, we consider the possibility of a multiplicity of collapses in each one of the modes of the Quantum Field. As we will see, the results are sensitive to a more detailed characterization of the collapse than those studied in the previous works, and in this regard two simple options will be studied. We find important constraints on the model, most remarkably on the number of possible collapses for each mode.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2010

The quantum origins of the cosmological asymmetry

The standard inflationary version of the origin of the cosmic structure as the result of the quantum fluctuations during the inflationary stage is less than fully satisfactory: how exactly does the Universe transit from a homogeneous and isotropic stage to one where the quantum uncertainties become actual inhomogeneous fluctuactions? The point is that the predictions of inflation in this regard cannot be fully justified in any known scheme of quantum physics. A proposal was made in [A. Perez, H. Sahlmann and D. Sudarsky, Classical and Quantum Gravity 23, 2317 (2006)] to solve this problem by invoking a process similar to the collapse of the quantum mechanical wave function of the various modes of the inflaton field. This in turn was inspired by ideas of R. Penrose about the roles that quantum gravity might play in bringing about such breakdown of standard unitary evolution of quantum mechanics. In this work we propose and study a new collapse scheme that follows the correlations indicated in the Wigner functional of the initial state. Furthermore, in his thesis work we will focus on a more detailed study of three collapse schemes (robustness, multiple collapses) and on the traces they might leave on the observational data.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2008

Phenomenological analysis of quantum collapse as source of the seeds of cosmic structure

The standard inflationary version of the origin of the cosmic structure as the result of the quantum fluctuations during the early universe is less than fully satisfactory as has been argued in [A. Perez, H. Sahlmann, and D. Sudarsky, Class. Quantum Grav., 23, 2317, (2006)]. A proposal is made there of a way to address the shortcomings by invoking a process similar to the collapse of the quantum mechanical wave function of the various modes of the inflaton field. This in turn was inspired on the ideas of R. Penrose about the role that quantum gravity might play in bringing about such breakdown of the standard unitary evolution of quantum mechanics. In this paper we study in some detail the two schemes of collapse considered in the original work together with an alternative scheme, which can be considered as "more natural" than the former two. The new scheme, assumes that the collapse follows the correlations indicated in the Wigner functional of the initial state. We end with considerations regarding the degree to which the various schemes can be expected to produce a spectrum that resembles the observed one.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2007

The Neutron as an Alternative Explanation for the Trans GZK Cosmic Rays

We consider the possibility that the particles in the Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays arriving to Earth might be neutrons instead of protons. We stress that in such case the argument for the GZK cutoff is weaker and that it is conceivable that neutrons would not be affected by it. This scenario would require the neutron to start with an energy larger than the observed one, in order to be able to travel the distances involved, within its proper life-time. It must then loose most of the extra energy through interaction with the galactic dark matter or some other matter in the intergalactic medium.

hep-ph↗