Related papers: Modeling Efficiency of Foreign Aid Allocation in M…
There is an extensive literature that studies how to find optimal policies in resource allocation problems, taking the underlying design parameters that define the allocation, such as what data is collected, how many people can be served,…
Often in prediction tasks, the predictive model itself can influence the distribution of the target variable, a phenomenon termed performative prediction. Generally, this influence stems from strategic actions taken by stakeholders with a…
Modeling binary and categorical data is one of the most commonly encountered tasks of applied statisticians and econometricians. While Bayesian methods in this context have been available for decades now, they often require a high level of…
BACKGROUND There is an increasing demand for high quality subnational estimates of under-five mortality. In low and middle income countries, where the burden of under-five mortality is concentrated, vital registration is often lacking and…
Machine learning-based estimates of poverty and wealth are increasingly being used to guide the targeting of humanitarian aid and the allocation of social assistance. However, the ground truth labels used to train these models are typically…
Spatial count data models are used to explain and predict the frequency of phenomena such as traffic accidents in geographically distinct entities such as census tracts or road segments. These models are typically estimated using Bayesian…
Estimating income distributions plays an important role in the measurement of inequality and poverty over space. The existing literature on income distributions predominantly focuses on estimating an income distribution for a country or a…
In modern distributed systems, efficient resource allocation is a vital aspect to maintain scalability, reduce operational costs, and ensure fast execution even across heterogeneous workloads. Predictive models for resource usage are…
Spatial documentation is exponentially increasing given the availability of Big IoT Data, enabled by the devices miniaturization and data storage capacity. Bayesian spatial statistics is a useful statistical tool to determine the dependence…
Urbanization is a common phenomenon in developing countries and it poses serious challenges when not managed effectively. Lack of proper planning and management may cause the encroachment of urban fabrics into reserved or special regions…
Predicting forced displacement is an important undertaking of many humanitarian aid agencies, which must anticipate flows in advance in order to provide vulnerable refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) with shelter, food, and…
This paper describes the mwBTFreddy dataset, a resource developed to support flash flood damage assessment in urban Malawi, specifically focusing on the impacts of Cyclone Freddy in 2023. The dataset comprises paired pre- and post-disaster…
The major sources of abundant data are constantly expanding with the available data collection methodologies in various applications - medical, insurance, scientific, bio-informatics and business. These data sets may be distributed…
Infectious diseases remain one of the major causes of human mortality and suffering. Mathematical models have been established as an important tool for capturing the features that drive the spread of the disease, predicting the progression…
The aim of this paper is to explore and develop advanced spatial Bayesian assessment methods and techniques for land use modeling. The paper provides a comprehensive guide for assessing additional informational entropy value of model…
The proliferation of mobile phones has made mobile payments to be widely used in developing economies. However, mobile payment usage in Malawi is low, and there are many limitations to encourage users to continuously use mobile payments.…
The need for rigorous and timely health and demographic summaries has provided the impetus for an explosion in geographic studies, with a common approach being the production of pixel-level maps, particularly in low and middle income…
To address the rising demand for strong packet delivery guarantees in networking, we study a novel way to perform graph resource allocation. We first introduce allocation graphs, in which nodes can independently set local resource limits…
Determining spatial distributions of species and communities are key objectives of ecology and conservation. Joint species distribution models use multi-species detection-nondetection data to estimate species and community distributions.…
In models of intra-household resource allocation, the earnings from joint work between two or more household members are often omitted. I test assumptions about complete pooling of resources within a household, by accounting for income…