Related papers: Political districting without geography
Territorial behaviour is widespread in the animal kingdom, with creatures seeking to gain parts of space for their exclusive use. It arises through a complicated interplay of many different behavioural features. Extracting and quantifying…
We begin with pervasive ultrametricity due to high dimensionality and/or spatial sparsity. How extent or degree of ultrametricity can be quantified leads us to the discussion of varied practical cases when ultrametricity can be partially or…
Rectangles are used to approximate objects, or sets of objects, in a plethora of applications, systems and index structures. Many tasks, such as nearest neighbor search and similarity ranking, require to decide if objects in one rectangle A…
Manifold optimization is ubiquitous in computational and applied mathematics, statistics, engineering, machine learning, physics, chemistry and etc. One of the main challenges usually is the non-convexity of the manifold constraints. By…
Composite development indicators used in policy making often subjectively aggregate a restricted set of indicators. We show, using dimensionality reduction techniques, including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and for the first time…
We investigate optimization models for the purpose of computational redistricting. Our focus is on nonconvex objectives for estimating expected Black Representatives and Political Representation. The objectives are a composition of a ratio…
Competition between languages or cultural traits diffusing in the same geographical area is studied combining the language competition model of Abrams and Strogatz and a human dispersal model on an inhomogeneous substrate. Also, the effect…
We introduce a new model of collective decision making, when a global decision needs to be made but the parties only possess partial information, and are unwilling (or unable) to first create a globalcomposite of their local views. Our…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
We consider an economic geography model with two inter-regional proximity structures: one governing goods trade and the other governing production externalities across regions. We investigate how the introduction of the latter affects the…
Depth is a concept that measures the `centrality' of a point in a given data cloud or in a given probability distribution. Every depth defines a family of so-called trimmed regions. For statistical applications it is desirable that with…
Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…
Separatism is examined in a long-run perspective. Accordingly, many political or economic factors which may be crucial in dealing with short-term episodes can be safely disregarded. Extending an approach pioneered by J. Jenkins, the paper…
Driven by access to large volumes of movement data, the study of human mobility has grown rapidly over the past decades. The field has shown that human mobility is scale-free, proposed models to generate scale-free moving distance…
We consider a class of games that are generalizations of the minority game, in that the demand and supply of the resource are specified independently. This allows us to study systems in which agents compete under different demand loads.…
Demographic parity (DP) is a widely studied fairness criterion in regression, enforcing independence between the predictions and sensitive attributes. However, constraining the entire distribution can degrade predictive accuracy and may be…
Representation learning is a fundamental task in machine learning, aiming at uncovering structures from data to facilitate subsequent tasks. However, what is a good representation for planning and reasoning in a stochastic world remains an…
Planning in adversarial and uncertain environments can be modeled as the problem of devising strategies in stochastic perfect information games. These games are generalizations of Markov decision processes (MDPs): there are two…
Cartograms are maps in which the areas of regions (e.g., countries or provinces) are proportional to a thematic mapping variable (e.g., population or gross domestic product). A cartogram is called contiguous if it keeps geographically…
Recent research in economic theory attempts to study optimal economic growth and spatial location of economic activity in a unified framework. So far, the key result of this literature - asymptotic convergence, even in the absence of…