My research focuses on reliable and trustworthy statistical learning at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and causality. I develop methods that combine predictive performance, interpretability, and robustness under real-world constraints such as heterogeneous, imperfect, and weakly labeled data. My work ranges from interpretable, knowledge-driven models to deep learning approaches, and more recently explores gray-box AI to bridge black-box learning with causal transparency. A central theme of my research is the integration of deep learning and causality; including causal representation learning, counterfactual robustness, causal inference from longitudinal data, and causal discovery; to design intrinsically interpretable models for reliable decision-making.
My postdoc work:In my postdoc, I proposed an ensemble method for uncertain measures. This method is based on smooth regression and decision trees which are constructed on a particular learning set. Each quantitative observation of the learning set is assumed to be an uncertain measure, i.e., has a known distribution (then a known variance parameter). To deal with this precious information, the empirical risk to minimize takes into account the probability that each observation belongs to each region of the input space. I worked on encoding the underlying algorithm for one smooth decision tree and random forest construction. The resulting approach called Smooth And Consistent Probabilistic Regression Trees was published in NeurIPS 2020.
The perspectives are to extend it to the classification task. Indeed, TotalEnergie company (financer of the project) is very interested in this work to learn regression or classification models for predicting welding quality. Therefore, I had the pleasure of working with welding experts on a real data set. A last perspective is to A recent perspective is to go beyond the association level to tackle causal questions from data which is often a key to discover how to alter and optimize the system of welding quality prediction.
My Ph.D. thesis and its perspectives:In my Ph.D. thesis, I developped an EM simultaneous estimation of a structural equation modeling and its latent factors. To construct practically a model and identify the explanatory blocks of variables, I have proposed to use a PCA. Instead of this manual step, we propose to add an algorithm step which, given an assumed number of explanatory blocks, computes the probability that each explanatory variable belongs to one block. We are comparing the performances of two approaches: SEM-Gibbs (Stochastic Expectation Maximization) and Lasso.
Among several perspective of my Ph.D work, I am currently working on Causality and the great contribution that could belong.
Ph.D. students:
- 2026-2029: G. Li co-supervised with M. Clausel (Univ. Lorraine). Funded by ANR (CLearDeep JCJC project).
- 2025-2028: A. Letelier co-supervised with A. Lomet (CEA), M. Clausel (Univ. Lorraine), R. Borsoi (Univ. Lorraine) Funded by CEA.
- 2024-2027: M. Benhamza co-supervised with M. Clausel (Univ. Lorraine). Funded by ANR (CLearDeep JCJC project).
- 2021-2024: M. El Bouchattaoui co-supervised with P.H. Cournède (MICS), B. Lepetit (Saint-Gobain). Funded by Saint-Gobain. CIFRE thesis.
- 2020-2023: E. Bennequin co-supervised with M. Aiguier (MICS), C. Hudelot (MICS), P.H. Cumenge (Sicara), A. Toubhans (Sicara). Funded by Sicara. CIFRE thesis.
- 2019-2022: V. Pellegrain co-supervised with C. Hudelot (MICS) and M. Batteux (IRT SystemX). Funded by IRT SystemX. CIFRE thesis.
- 2019-2021: Y. Ouali co-supervised with C. Hudelot (MICS).
- 2019-2021: V. Bouvier co-supervised with C. Hudelot (MICS), P. Very (Sidetrade), C. Chastagnol (Sidetrade). Funded by the company Sidetrade. CIFRE thesis.
Interns:
- 2026: M-J. Baim (Master 2 research intern on Causality Based Indirect Poisoning : Attacks and Defenses) funded via BNP Paribas.
- 2026: Y. El Fataoui (Master 2 research intern on Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Photovoltaic Time Series Using Generative Models) funded via a research collaboration with Total Energies company.
- 2024: M. Benhamza (Master 2 research intern on Certifiably Robust and Stable Causal Disentanglement with Lipschitz-Constrained Spline Neural Networks) funded via MICS lab.
- 2023: A. Nait Slimen (Master 1 research intern in Confidence intervals estimation of a Li-on battery aging model) funded via a research collaboration with the SAFT company.
- 2022: A. G. Reisach (research engineer intern in causality) co-supervised with C. Hudelot (MICS)
- 2022: T. Dujardin (Master research intern in multi-modal learning for emotion prediction) co-supervised with M. Clausel (IECL)
- 2021: M. de Richaud (Master research intern in ensemble learning)
- 2019: V. Pellegrain (Master research intern in deep Learning for time series data) co-supervised with C. Hudelot (MICS) and M. Batteux (IRT SystemX).
Master students:
- 2023: M. Benhamza and A. El Ouafi.
- 2021: J. Loubet and P. Loubet.
- 2020: N. Sedki and P. Dampierre.