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The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…
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,…
Simulation methods have become important tools for quantifying partisan and racial bias in redistricting plans. We generalize the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm of McCartan and Imai (2023), one of the commonly used approaches.…
We propose a method for redistricting, decomposing a geographical area into subareas, called districts, so that the populations of the districts are as close as possible and the districts are compact and contiguous. Each district is the…
Markov chains based on spanning trees have been hugely influential in algorithms for assessing fairness in political redistricting. The input graph represents the geographic building blocks of a jurisdiction. The goal is to output a large…
In the United States, regions are frequently divided into districts for the purpose of electing representatives. How the districts are drawn can affect who's elected, and drawing districts to give an advantage to a certain group is known as…
In the computational study of political redistricting, feasibility necessitates the use of a discretization of regions such as states, counties, and towns. In nearly all cases, researchers use a dual graph, whose vertices represent small…
Recently, an increasing number of researchers, especially in the realm of political redistricting, have proposed sampling-based techniques to generate a subset of plans from the vast space of districting plans. These techniques have been…
In political redistricting, the compactness of a district is used as a quantitative proxy for its fairness. Several well-established, yet competing, notions of geographic compactness are commonly used to evaluate the shapes of regions,…
To audit political district maps for partisan gerrymandering, one may determine a baseline for the expected distribution of partisan outcomes by sampling an ensemble of maps. One approach to sampling is to use redistricting policy as a…
Ensemble models refer to methods that combine a typically large number of classifiers into a compound prediction. The output of an ensemble method is the result of fitting a base-learning algorithm to a given data set, and obtaining diverse…
We define and study a spectral recombination algorithm, SpecReCom, for partitioning a graph into a given number of connected parts. It is straightforward to introduce additional constraints such as the requirement that the weight (or number…
Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which…
The mathematics of redistricting is an area of study that has exploded in recent years. In particular, many different research groups and expert witnesses in court cases have used outlier analysis to argue that a proposed map is a…
Network reconstruction is the task of inferring the unseen interactions between elements of a system, based only on their behavior or dynamics. This inverse problem is in general ill-posed, and admits many solutions for the same…
Distribution-free uncertainty estimation for ensemble methods is increasingly desirable due to the widening deployment of multi-modal black-box predictive models. Conformal prediction is one approach that avoids such distributional…
Ensemble methods are among the state-of-the-art predictive modeling approaches. Applied to modern big data, these methods often require a large number of sub-learners, where the complexity of each learner typically grows with the size of…
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…
The recent wave of attention to partisan gerrymandering has come with a push to refine or replace the laws that govern political redistricting around the country. A common element in several states' reform efforts has been the inclusion of…
I introduce a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) scheme in which sampling from a distribution with density pi(x) is done using updates operating on an "ensemble" of states. The current state x is first stochastically mapped to an ensemble,…