David Sontag
Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); Associate Professor, Medical Engineering

David Sontag is a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and head of the Clinical Machine Learning Group. He is also an investigator at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research focuses on advancing machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, and using those tools to transform health care. He and his group develop algorithms that use data to make better clinical predictions; create novel methods for answering causal queries that work effectively with high-dimensional data; and are building a foundation for the next-generation of intelligent electronic health records.
Publications
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Oberst, M., Johansson, F., Wei, D., Gao, T., Brat, G., Sontag, D., Varshney, K. (2020). Characterization of Overlap in Observational Studies. Twenty-Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AI-STATS).
- Oberst, M., Sontag, D. (2019). Counterfactual Off-Policy Evaluation with Gumbel-Max Structural Causal Models. Thirty-Sixth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
- Lang, H., Sontag, D., Vijayaraghavan, A. (2018) Optimality of Approximate Inference Algorithms on Stable Instances. Twenty-First International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AI-STATS).
- Chen, I., Johansson, F., Sontag, D. (2018). Why is My Classifier Discriminatory?. 32nd International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
- Blecker, S., Katz, S., Horwitz, L., Kuperman, G., Park, H., Gold, A., Sontag, D. (Oct. 2016). Comparison of Approaches for Heart Failure Case Identification From Electronic Health Record Data. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Cardiology.
Media
- January 9, 2020: MIT News, How well can computers connect symptoms to diseases?
- July 24, 2019: MIT News, Want to know what software-driven health care looks like? This class offers some clues.
- July 21, 2019: MIT News, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands tours MIT.
- May 10, 2018: MIT News, The tenured engineers of 2018.