Related papers: Voting Rights, Markov Chains, and Optimization by …
We consider a branching random walk in a random space-time environment of disasters where each particle is killed when meeting a disaster. This extends the model of the "random walk in a disastrous random environment" introduced by [15]. We…
We establish the discrete approximation to Brownian motion with varying dimension (BMVD in abbreviation) by random walks. The setting is very similar to that in [11], but here we use a different method allowing us to get rid the…
We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…
Shortlisting of candidates--selecting a group of "best" candidates--is a special case of multiwinner elections. We provide the first in-depth study of the computational complexity of strategic voting for shortlisting based on the perhaps…
We investigate the effects of markovian resseting events on continuous time random walks where the waiting times and the jump lengths are random variables distributed according to power law probability density functions. We prove the…
We consider branching particle processes on discrete structures like the hypercube in a random fitness landscape (i.e., random branching/killing rates). The main question is about the location where the main part of the population sits at a…
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…
Election rules are formal processes that aggregate voters preferences, typically to select a single candidate, called the winner. Most of the election rules studied in the literature require the voters to rank the candidates from the most…
The paper considers the distribution of a general linear combination of central and non-central chi-square random variables by exploring the branch cut regions that appear in the standard Laplace inversion process. Due to the original…
We study the problem of a partisan gerrymanderer who assigns voters to equipopulous districts so as to maximize his party's expected seat share. The designer faces both aggregate uncertainty (how many votes his party will receive) and…
The ability to manipulate and control fluid flows is of great importance in many scientific and engineering applications. Here, a cluster-based control framework is proposed to determine optimal control laws with respect to a cost function…
When a large group of pedestrians moves around a corner, most pedestrians do not follow the shortest path, which is to stay as close as possible to the inner wall, but try to minimize the travel time. For this they accept to move on a…
Sequential decision making under uncertainty is studied in a mixed observability domain. The goal is to maximize the amount of information obtained on a partially observable stochastic process under constraints imposed by a fully observable…
The goal of robust motion planning consists of designing open-loop controls which optimally steer a system to a specific target region while mitigating uncertainties and disturbances which affect the dynamics. Recently, stochastic optimal…
This contribution investigates situations in pedestrian dynamics, where trying to walk the shortest path leads to largely different results than trying to walk the quickest path. A heuristic one-shot method to model the influence of the…
Optimization problems with stochastic dominance constraints provide a possibility to shape risk by selecting a benchmark random outcome with a desired distribution. The comparison of the relevant random outcomes to the respective benchmarks…
Resource allocation takes place in various types of real-world complex systems such as urban traf- fic, social services institutions, economical and ecosystems. Mathematically, the dynamical process of complex resource allocation can be…
The paper develops a general framework for constrained clustering which is based on the close connection of geometric clustering and diagrams. Various new structural and algorithmic results are proved (and known results generalized and…
Partisan gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy. Moreover, the complexity of the districting task may exceed human capacities. One potential solution is using computational models to automate the districting process by optimizing…
We introduce a new Markov Chain called the Cycle Walk for sampling measures of graph partitions where the partition elements have roughly equal size. Such Markov Chains are of current interest in the generation and evaluation of political…