Julio Michael Stern

Marcos Vinicius M. Silva, Marcos Antonio Simplicio, Roberto Augusto Castellanos Pfeiffer et al.

Many real-world scenarios require the random selection of one or more individuals from a pool of eligible candidates. One example of especial social relevance refers to the legal system, in which the jurors and judges are commonly picked according to some probability distribution aiming to avoid biased decisions. In this scenario, ensuring auditability of the random drawing procedure is imperative to promote confidence in its fairness. With this goal in mind, this article describes a protocol for random drawings specially designed for use in legal systems. The proposed design combines the following properties: security by design, ensuring the fairness of the random draw as long as at least one participant behaves honestly; auditability by any interested party, even those having no technical background, using only public information; and statistical robustness, supporting drawings where candidates may have distinct probability distributions. Moreover, it is capable of inviting and engaging as participating stakeholders the main interested parties of a legal process, in a way that promotes process transparency, public trust and institutional resilience. An open-source implementation is also provided as supplementary material.

Olivia Saa, Julio Michael Stern

Randomization is an integral part of well-designed statistical trials, and is also a required procedure in legal systems, see Marcondes et al. (2019) This paper presents an easy to implement randomization protocol that assures, in a formal mathematical setting, a statistically sound, computationally efficient, cryptographically secure, traceable and auditable randomization procedure that is also resistant to collusion and manipulation by participating agents.

Pablo de Morais Andrade, Julio Michael Stern, Carlos Alberto de Bragança Pereira

Conditional independence tests (CI tests) have received special attention lately in Machine Learning and Computational Intelligence related literature as an important indicator of the relationship among the variables used by their models. In the field of Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM)--which includes Bayesian Networks (BN) models--CI tests are especially important for the task of learning the PGM structure from data. In this paper, we propose the Full Bayesian Significance Test (FBST) for tests of conditional independence for discrete datasets. FBST is a powerful Bayesian test for precise hypothesis, as an alternative to frequentist's significance tests (characterized by the calculation of the \emph{p-value}).