Related papers: A discrete districting plan
Domination problems in general can capture situations in which some entities have an effect on other entities (and sometimes on themselves). The usual goal is to select a minimum number of entities that can influence a target group of…
We explore the Declination, a new metric intended to detect partisan gerrymandering. We consider instances in which each district has equal turnout, the maximum turnout to minimum turnout is bounded, and turnout is unrestricted. For each of…
Probabilistic independence can dramatically simplify the task of eliciting, representing, and computing with probabilities in large domains. A key technique in achieving these benefits is the idea of graphical modeling. We survey existing…
We investigate a social system of agents faced with a binary choice. We assume there is a correct, or beneficial, outcome of this choice. Furthermore, we assume agents are influenced by others in making their decision, and that the agents…
Our goal is to forecast the near future given a set of recent observations. We think this ability to forecast, i.e., to anticipate, is integral for the success of autonomous agents which need not only passively analyze an observation but…
In the face of adverse motives, it is indispensable to achieve a consensus. Elections have been the canonical way by which modern democracy has operated since the 17th century. Nowadays, they regulate markets, provide an engine for modern…
The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…
In this paper we describe a decision process framework allowing an agent to decide what information it should reveal to its neighbours within a communication graph in order to maximise its utility. We assume that these neighbours can pass…
The voter model with the node update rule is numerically investigated on a directed network. We start from a directed hierarchical tree, and split and rewire each incoming arc at the probability $p$. In order to discriminate the better and…
In the evolving voter model, when an individual interacts with a neighbor having an opinion different from theirs, they will with probability $1-\alpha$ imitate the neighbor but with probability $ \alpha$ will sever the connection and…
A discrete-time stochastic process derived from a model of basketball is used to generalize any discrete distribution. The generalized distributions can have one or two more parameters than the parent distribution. Those derived from…
Finding outlying elements in probability distributions can be a hard problem. Taking a real example from Voting Rights Act enforcement, we consider the problem of maximizing the number of simultaneous majority-minority districts in a…
Folding is emerging as a promising manufacturing process to transform flat materials into functional structures, offering efficiency by reducing the need for welding, gluing, and molding, while minimizing waste and enabling automation.…
One of the consequences of persistent technological change is that it force individuals to make decisions under extreme uncertainty. This means that traditional decision-making frameworks cannot be applied. To address this issue we…
In the design and analysis of political redistricting maps, it is often useful to be able to sample from the space of all partitions of the graph of census blocks into connected subgraphs of equal population. There are influential Markov…
Typically, discrete choice modelers develop ever-more advanced models and estimation methods. Compared to the impressive progress in model development and estimation, model-checking techniques have lagged behind. Often, choice modelers use…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
We consider the problem of protecting and manipulating elections by recounting and changing ballots, respectively. Our setting involves a plurality-based election held across multiple districts, and the problem formulations are based on the…
Model selection requires repeatedly evaluating models on a given dataset and measuring their relative performances. In modern applications of machine learning, the models being considered are increasingly more expensive to evaluate and the…
In discrete choice experiments, the information matrix depends on the model parameters. Therefore designing optimally informative experiments for arbitrary initial parameters often yields highly nonlinear optimization problems and makes…