Research Interest
- Causal Inference
- Political Methodology
Contact Information
sooahnshin_at_g.harvard.eduSooahn Shin
Sooahn Shin
I’m a Data Scientist at Airbnb. I earned my PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University, where I studied political methodology and causal inference.
My research programs focus on developing methods for (1) measuring ideological scores beyond a single-dimensional scale, (2) assessing decision-making systems with algorithmic recommendations, and (3) addressing bias from missing values when estimating causal effects using panel data.
I recieved the John T. Williams dissertation prize from the Society for Political Methodology for "the best dissertation proposal in the area of political methodology."
Publications
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"Does AI help humans make better decisions? A statistical evaluation framework for experimental and observational studies"
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025. -
"ℓ1-based Bayesian Ideal Point Model for Multidimensional Politics"
Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2025. -
"Experimental Evaluation of Algorithm-Assisted Human Decision-Making: Application to Pretrial Public Safety Assessment"
(with discussion), Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society), 2023. -
"Bayesian Methods in Political Science"
Luigi Curini and Robert Franzese eds., The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science & International Relations, 2020.
Working Papers
Ideal Point Estimation Beyond a Single Dimension
Impact of AI on Human Decisions
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"Triage Score: A Counterfactual Risk Assessment Instrument"
Causal Inference Using Panel Data with Missingness
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"Difference-in-differences Design with Outcomes Missing Not at Random"
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"Synthetic Control Methods with Missing Pre-treatment Outcomes"
Teaching Fellow
At Harvard, I served as a teaching fellow for PhD-level courses in causal inference, Bayesian statistics, and machine learning, all part of the Government Department Methods Sequence.
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Causal Inference with Applications, Fall 2023 [course website]
Gov 2003,
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Applied Bayesian Statistics for the Social Sciences, Spring 2023 [syllabus]
Gov 2017,
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Data Science for the Social Sciences, Fall 2022 [course
website]
Gov 50 (undergraduate),
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Introduction to Machine Learning, Spring 2022
Gov 2018,
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Causal Inference with Applications, Fall 2021 [section notes]
Gov 2003,
Software
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aihuman (Available on CRAN)
R package written in Rcpp for an experimental evaluation of causal impacts of algorithmic recommendations on human decisions developed by Imai et al. (JRSS, 2023) and Ben-Michael et al. (PNAS, 2025). -
issueirt
R package for issue specific ideal point estimation developed by Shin (working paper). It uses Stan. -
l1ideal
R package for ℓ1 norm based multidimensional ideal point estimation developed by Shin et al. (JASA, 2025). It uses multivariate slice sampling for the estimation.