Related papers: A Relative Efficiency Gap formula for measuring Po…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
Estimation of value in policy gradient methods is a fundamental problem. Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) is an exponentially-weighted estimator of an advantage function similar to $\lambda$-return. It substantially reduces the…
We introduce a novel partial differential equations approach for addressing the problem of partisan gerrymandering. Our method is based on volume preserving curvature flow, a partial differential equation which we adapt to smooth voting…
The margin of victory of an election is a useful measure to capture the robustness of an election outcome. It also plays a crucial role in determining the sample size of various algorithms in post election audit, polling etc. In this work,…
Motivated by putting empirical work based on (synthetic) election data on a more solid mathematical basis, we analyze six distances among elections, including, e.g., the challenging-to-compute but very precise swap distance and the distance…
We study a model of temporal voting where there is a fixed time horizon, and at each round the voters report their preferences over the available candidates and a single candidate is selected. Prior work has adapted popular notions of…
We consider the measures of partisan symmetry proposed for practical use in the political science literature, as clarified and developed in Katz, King, and Rosenblatt (2020). Elementary mathematical manipulation shows the symmetry metrics…
Algorithmic and statistical approaches to congressional redistricting are becoming increasingly valuable tools in courts and redistricting commissions for quantifying gerrymandering in the United States. While there is existing literature…
In representative democracy, a redistricting map is chosen to partition an electorate into districts which each elects a representative. A valid redistricting map must satisfy a collection of constraints such as being compact, contiguous,…
The notion of distortion in social choice problems has been defined to measure the loss in efficiency -- typically measured by the utilitarian social welfare, the sum of utilities of the participating agents -- due to having access only to…
Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, ordinal rankings are often the only available…
The use of rapidity gaps is proposed as a measure of the spatial pattern of an event. When the event multiplicity is low, the gaps between neighboring particles carry far more information about an event than multiplicity spikes, which may…
The measurement of the efficiency of an event selection is always an important part of the analysis of experimental data. The statistical techniques which are needed to determine the efficiency and its uncertainty are reviewed. Frequentist…
Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan…
Imputation models sometimes use auxiliary variables that, though not part of the planned analysis, can improve the accuracy of imputed values and the efficiency of point estimates. A recent article, using evidence from simulations, argued…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extremely effective in approximating complex distributions of high-dimensional, input data samples, and substantial progress has been made in understanding and improving GAN performance in…
In proportional elections with open lists the excess of preferences received by candidates with respect to the list average is known to follow a universal lognormal distribution. We show that lognormality is broken provided preferences are…
The classic house allocation problem is primarily concerned with finding a matching between a set of agents and a set of houses that guarantees some notion of economic efficiency (e.g. utilitarian welfare). While recent works have shifted…
As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation…
This paper presents a new distance metric to compare two continuous probability density functions. The main advantage of this metric is that, unlike other statistical measurements, it can provide an analytic, closed-form expression for a…