Related papers: The study of a new gerrymandering methodology
Districting-and-routing is a strategic problem aiming to aggregate basic geographical units (e.g., zip codes) into delivery districts. Its goal is to minimize the expected long-term routing cost of performing deliveries in each district…
We formulate a spectral graph-partitioning algorithm that uses the two leading eigenvectors of the matrix corresponding to a selected quality function to split a network into three communities in a single step. In so doing, we extend the…
In network theory, a triad census is a method designed to categorize and enumerate the various types of subgraphs with three nodes and their connecting edges within a network. Triads serve as fundamental building blocks for comprehending…
Recently, a proposal has been advanced to detect unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering with a simple formula called the efficiency gap. The efficiency gap is now working its way towards a possible landmark case in the Supreme Court. This…
In the past few years, a successful line of research has lead to lower bounds for several fundamental local graph problems in the distributed setting. These results were obtained via a technique called round elimination. On a high level,…
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
Gerrymandering is a pervasive problem within the US political system. In the past decade, methods based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and statistical outlier tests have been proposed to quantify gerrymandering and were used as…
State delegations are often chosen through single-member district elections, creating a tension between respecting district majorities and reflecting the statewide electorate. First-past-the-post (FPTP) follows each district's majority but…
Recently, several image segmentation methods that welcome and leverage different types of user assistance have been developed. In these methods, the user inputs can be provided by drawing bounding boxes over image objects, drawing scribbles…
Given a graph $G = (V,E)$ with vertex weights $w(v)$ and a desired number of parts $k$, the goal in graph partitioning problems is to partition the vertex set V into parts $V_1,\ldots,V_k$. Metrics for compactness, contiguity, and balance…
Granular geographic data present new opportunities to understand how neighborhoods are formed, and how they influence politics. At the same time, the inherent subjectivity of neighborhoods creates methodological challenges in measuring and…
Proportional apportionment is the problem of assigning seats to parties according to their relative share of votes. Divisor methods are the de-facto standard solution, used in many countries. In recent literature, there are two algorithms…
In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…
The apportionment problem constitutes a fundamental problem in democratic societies: How to distribute a fixed number of seats among a set of states in proportion to the states' populations? This--seemingly simple--task has led to a rich…
This paper revisits a fundamental distributed computing problem in the population protocol model. Provided $n$ agents each starting with an input color in $[k]$, the relative majority problem asks to find the predominant color. In the…
We introduce a new method for performing clustering with the aim of fitting clusters with different scatters and weights. It is designed by allowing to handle a proportion $\alpha$ of contaminating data to guarantee the robustness of the…
Geodesic models are known as an efficient tool for solving various image segmentation problems. Most of existing approaches only exploit local pointwise image features to track geodesic paths for delineating the objective boundaries.…
Well-spread samples are desirable in many disciplines because they improve estimation when target variables exhibit spatial structure. This paper introduces an integrated methodological framework for spreading samples over the population's…
Given a rectangle $R$ with area $A$ and a set of areas $L=\{A_1,...,A_n\}$ with $\sum_{i=1}^n A_i = A$, we consider the problem of partitioning $R$ into $n$ sub-regions $R_1,...,R_n$ with areas $A_1,...,A_n$ in a way that the total…
We study a portioning setting in which a public resource such as time or money is to be divided among a given set of candidates, and each agent proposes a division of the resource. We consider two families of aggregation rules for this…