Winston Chou

About Me

I'm a Staff Research Scientist at Netflix with expertise on causal inference and experimentation.

I enjoy working on highly intersectional teams and problems, and am proud to have published my work in leading journals and conferences in data science, political science, sociology, and economics.

Before joining Netflix, I was a Staff Data Scientist at Apple, where I helped build Siri's A/B testing platform, and a Research Scientist at Facebook, where I worked on missing data problems in ads measurement.

I received my PhD in political science from Princeton University, where I was fortunate to be advised by Rafaela Dancygier and Kosuke Imai. I studied voting decisions and survey methodology and wrote a dissertation on electoral politics in Europe.

My wife, Katherine McCabe, teaches American politics and data science at Rutgers University.

My resume can be found here.


Accepting the Best Paper Award at KDD '25 -- a real career highlight!

Research

  1. Zielnicki, Kevin, Guy Aridor, Aurélien Bibaut, Allen Tran, Winston Chou, and Nathan Kallus. "The value of personalized recommendations: Evidence from Netflix."
  2. Lal, Apoorva and Winston Chou. 2026. "Estimating representative causal effects with double machine learning."
    • To appear at European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD '26).
    • Presented at 3rd Workshop on Causal Inference and Machine Learning in Practice at KDD '25 (as "Does residuals-on-residuals regression produce representative estimates of causal effects?").
  3. Chou, Winston. 2026. "Blending proxy metrics with a north star." To appear at ECML PKDD '26.
  4. Chou, Winston, Colin Gray, Nathan Kallus, Aurélien Bibaut, and Simon Ejdemyr. 2025. "Evaluating decision rules across many weak experiments ." Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '25). Best Paper Award (Applied Data Science).
  5. Bibaut, Aurélien, Winston Chou, Simon Ejdemyr, and Nathan Kallus. 2024. "Learning the covariance of treatment effects across many weak experiments ." Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '24').
  6. Chou, Winston. 2021. "Randomized controlled trials without data retention." Presented at Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE@MIT).
  7. Chou, Winston and Rafaela Dancygier. 2021. "Why parties displace their voters: Gentrification, coalitional change, and the demise of public housing." American Political Science Review. A nice blog post on this paper.
  8. Chou, Winston, Rafaela Dancygier, Naoki Egami, and Amaney Jamal. 2021. "Competing for loyalists? How party positioning affects populist radical right voting." Comparative Political Studies. Shared on the Monkey Cage blog and CNN.
  9. Chou, Winston, Kosuke Imai, and Bryn Rosenfeld. 2020. "Sensitive survey questions with auxiliary information." Sociological Methods & Research.
  10. Blair, Graeme, Winston Chou, and Kosuke Imai. 2019. "List experiments with measurement error." Political Analysis.
  11. Chou, Winston. 2017. "Culture remains elusive: On the identification of cultural effects with instrumental variables." American Sociological Review.
  12. Chou, Winston. 2016. "Seen like a state: How illegitimacy shapes terrorism designation." Social Forces.