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The Bayesian statistical paradigm provides a principled and coherent approach to probabilistic forecasting. Uncertainty about all unknowns that characterize any forecasting problem -- model, parameters, latent states -- is able to be…
There is a tight connection between credit access and voting. We show that uncertainty in access to credit pushes voters toward more conservative candidates in US elections. Using a 1% sample of the US population with valid credit reports,…
The evaluation of a multifaceted program against extreme poverty in different developing countries gave encouraging results, but with important heterogeneity between countries. This master thesis proposes to study this heterogeneity with a…
Ranking, and inferences based on ranking of a set of entities, are important problems in numerous contexts. This is especially true in small area statistics where there may be only a limited amount of directly observed data from each entity…
Counting votes is complex and error-prone. Several statistical methods have been developed to assess election accuracy by manually inspecting randomly selected physical ballots. Two 'principled' methods are risk-limiting audits (RLAs) and…
A lack of financial access, which is often an issue in many central-city U.S. neighborhoods, can be linked to higher interest rates as well as negative health and psychological outcomes. A number of analyses of "banking deserts" have also…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging…
This study demonstrates the persistent dominance of identity based voting across democratic systems, using the United States as a primary case and comparative analyses of 19 other democracies as counterfactuals. Drawing solely on election…
Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or…
We consider the problem of geographic profiling and offer an approach to choosing a suitable model for each offender. Based on the analysis of the examined dataset, we divide offenders into several types with similar behavior. According to…
Using the recently introduced declination function, we estimate the net number of seats won in the US House of Representatives due to asymmetries in vote distributions. Such asymmetries can arise from combinations of partisan gerrymandering…
We discuss a Bayesian model selection approach to high dimensional data in the deep under sampling regime. The data is based on a representation of the possible discrete states $s$, as defined by the observer, and it consists of $M$…
In this paper, we explore the relationship between state-level household income inequality and macroeconomic uncertainty in the United States. Using a novel large-scale macroeconometric model, we shed light on regional disparities of…
Multivariate categorical data are common in many fields. We are motivated by election polls studies assessing evidence of changes in voters opinions with their candidates preferences in the 2016 United States Presidential primaries or…
Partisan gerrymandering is a major cause for voter disenfranchisement in United States. However, convincing US courts to adopt specific measures to quantify gerrymandering has been of limited success to date. Recently, Stephanopoulos and…
Random partition models are widely used in Bayesian methods for various clustering tasks, such as mixture models, topic models, and community detection problems. While the number of clusters induced by random partition models has been…
We focus on the scenario in which an agent can exploit his information advantage to manipulate the outcome of an election. In particular, we study district-based elections with two candidates, in which the winner of the election is the…
Understanding and predicting human migration patterns is a central challenge in population dynamics research. Traditional physics-inspired gravity and radiation models represent migration flows as functions of attractiveness using…
We develop a Bayesian state-space model for analyzing the dynamic evolution of income distributions using grouped income data. The model combines the generalized beta distribution of the second kind (GB2) with latent time-varying parameters…