Related papers: Three Applications of Entropy to Gerrymandering
Recently, a proposal has been advanced to detect unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering with a simple formula called the efficiency gap. The efficiency gap is now working its way towards a possible landmark case in the Supreme Court. This…
We introduce the Geography and Election Outcome (GEO) metric, a new method for identifying potential partisan gerrymanders. In contrast with currently popular methods, the GEO metric uses both geographic information about a districting plan…
"Compactness," or the use of shape as a proxy for fairness, has been a long-running theme in the scrutiny of electoral districts; badly-shaped districts are often flagged as examples of the abuse of power known as gerrymandering. The most…
There has been a recent media blitz on a cohort of mathematicians valiantly working to fix America's democratic system by combatting gerrymandering with geometry. While statistics commonly features in the courtroom (forensics, DNA analysis,…
This is a review on entropy in various fields of mathematics and science. Its scope is to convey a unified vision of the classical as well as some newer entropy notions to a broad audience with an intermediate background in dynamical…
Gerrymandering voting districts is one of the most salient concerns of contemporary American society, and the creation of new voting maps, along with their subsequent legal challenges, speaks for much of our modern political discourse. The…
Entropy can signify different things: For instance, heat transfer in thermodynamics or a measure of information in data analysis. Many entropies have been introduced and it can be difficult to ascertain their different importance and…
The entropy is a measure of uncertainty that plays a central role in information theory. When the distribution of the data is unknown, an estimate of the entropy needs be obtained from the data sample itself. We propose a semi-parametric…
Entropy is the measure of uncertainty in any data and is adopted for maximisation of mutual information in many remote sensing operations. The availability of wide entropy variations motivated us for an investigation over the suitability…
Entropy is a very useful concept from physics that tries to explain how a system behaves from a point of view of the thermodynamics. However, there are two ways to explain entropy, and it depends on if we are studying a microsystem or a…
We explain the notion of the {\em entropy} of a discrete random variable, and derive some of its basic properties. We then show through examples how entropy can be useful as a combinatorial enumeration tool. We end with a few open…
Entropy has emerged as a dynamic, interdisciplinary, and widely accepted quantitative measure of uncertainty across different disciplines. A unified understanding of entropy measures, supported by a detailed review of their theoretical…
The Political Districting Problem is mapped to a $q$-state Potts model in which the constraints can be written as interactions between sites or external fields acting on the system. Districting into $q$ voter districts is equivalent to…
In recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
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 2016, a Wisconsin court struck down the state assembly map due to unconstitutional gerrymandering. If this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court's pending 2018 decision, it will be the fist successful political gerrymandering case in the…
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…
Metric embedding is a powerful tool used extensively in mathematics and computer science. We devise a new method of using metric embeddings recursively, which turns out to be particularly effective in $\ell_p$ spaces, $p>2$, yielding…
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,…
In this letter we propose the use of physics techniques for entropy determination on constrained parameter optimization problems. The main feature of such techniques, the construction of an unbiased walk on energy space, suggests their use…