Ted Enamorado | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

When Predictions Become Regressors: A Split-Sample Correction for Biases in Downstream Inference

Prediction-based methods, including Large Language Models (LLMs) and other machine learning techniques, are often used to construct measures of political phenomena that are difficult to quantify directly, such as policy positions in manifestos or emotions expressed on social media. In many applications, these prediction-generated measures are used as explanatory variables in regression models, even though they are measured with error. This leads to biased estimates. In this paper, we propose a simple solution to these biases: instrumental variables constructed from multiple measures created on independent splits of the original data. This approach is theoretically valid, easy to implement, and does not require new data. Through simulations, we show that this approach recovers estimates close to the true values, even in relatively small samples, while the standard approach can produce substantial bias in practice. We illustrate the method by revisiting two applications: whether gendered speech affects legislative outcomes in the German Parliament, and whether political risk influences poverty alleviation programs in China.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2022

Improving Probabilistic Models in Text Classification via Active Learning

Social scientists often classify text documents to use the resulting labels as an outcome or a predictor in empirical research. Automated text classification has become a standard tool, since it requires less human coding. However, scholars still need many human-labeled documents to train automated classifiers. To reduce labeling costs, we propose a new algorithm for text classification that combines a probabilistic model with active learning. The probabilistic model uses both labeled and unlabeled data, and active learning concentrates labeling efforts on difficult documents to classify. Our validation study shows that the classification performance of our algorithm is comparable to state-of-the-art methods at a fraction of the computational cost. Moreover, we replicate two recently published articles and reach the same substantive conclusions with only a small proportion of the original labeled data used in those studies. We provide activeText, an open-source software to implement our method.

cs.CL↗