Related papers: Quantifying Gerrymandering in North Carolina
We model the societal task of redistricting political districts as a partitioning problem: Given a set of $n$ points in the plane, each belonging to one of two parties, and a parameter $k$, our goal is to compute a partition $\Pi$ of the…
In this work we focus on the construction of numerical schemes for the approximation of stochastic mean--field equations which preserve the nonnegativity of the solution. The method here developed makes use of a mean-field Monte Carlo…
A simple and efficient method for characterization of multidimensional Gaussian states is suggested and experimentally demonstrated. Our scheme shows analogies with tomography of finite dimensional quantum states, with the covariance matrix…
Sequential Monte Carlo techniques are useful for state estimation in non-linear, non-Gaussian dynamic models. These methods allow us to approximate the joint posterior distribution using sequential importance sampling. In this framework,…
We compare federal election results for each state versus the USA in every second year from 1992 to 2018, to model partisan lean of each state and its dependence on the nationwide popular vote. For each state, we model both its current…
We present a novel approach to the measurement of American state legislature polarization with an experimental comparison of three different machine learning algorithms. Our approach strictly relies on public data sources and open source…
We present a new Monte Carlo algorithm that produces results of high accuracy with reduced simulational effort. Independent random walks are performed (concurrently or serially) in different, restricted ranges of energy, and the resultant…
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Sampling-based methods such as ReCom are widely used to audit redistricting plans for fairness, with the balanced spanning tree distribution playing a central role since it favors compact, contiguous, and population-balanced districts.…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
Eliciting relevance judgments for ranking evaluation is labor-intensive and costly, motivating careful selection of which documents to judge. Unlike traditional approaches that make this selection deterministically, probabilistic sampling…
Random samples of quantum states with specific properties are useful for various applications, such as Monte Carlo integration over the state space. In the high-dimensional situations that one encounters already for a few qubits, the…
On the basis of a formula for calculating seat shares and natural thresholds in multidistrict elections under the Jefferson-D'Hondt system and a probabilistic model of electoral behavior based on P\'{o}lya's urn model, we propose a new…
Our main contribution is the introduction of the map of elections framework. A map of elections consists of three main elements: (1) a dataset of elections (i.e., collections of ordinal votes over given sets of candidates), (2) a way of…
A complex two-parameter model resembling the classical voter model is introduced to describe macroecological properties of tropical tree communities. Monte-Carlo type computer simulations are performed on the model, investigating species…
We formulate and solve a regression problem with time-stamped distributional data. Distributions are considered as points in the Wasserstein space of probability measures, metrized by the 2-Wasserstein metric, and may represent images,…
In agricultural landscapes, the composition and spatial configuration of cultivated and semi-natural elements strongly impact species dynamics, their interactions and habitat connectivity. To allow for landscape structural analysis and…
We propose new methods of electoral statistics. With their help, we study transcripts of vote counting in municipal elections. We construct and apply effective statistical tests to detect the ballot stuffing at the level of individual…