Related papers: Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods
Data visualizations are increasingly seen as socially constructed, with several recent studies positing that perceptions and interpretations of visualization artifacts are shaped through complex sets of interactions between members of a…
A powerful framework for studying graphs is to consider them as geometric graphs: nodes are randomly sampled from an underlying metric space, and any pair of nodes is connected if their distance is less than a specified neighborhood radius.…
An urban planner might design the spatial layout of transportation amenities so as to improve accessibility for underserved communities -- a fairness objective. However, implementing such a design might trigger processes of neighborhood…
Geographic regression models of various descriptions are often applied to identify patterns and anomalies in the determinants of spatially distributed observations. These types of analyses focus on answering why questions about underlying…
Gerrymandering is one of the biggest threats to American democracy. By manipulating district lines, politicians effectively choose their voters rather than the other way around. Current gerrymandering identification methods (namely the…
Social surveys have been widely used as a method of obtaining public opinion. Sometimes it is more ideal to collect opinions by presenting questions in free-response formats than in multiple-choice formats. Despite their advantages,…
Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints, often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of our social…
Neighborhood-based recommenders are a major class of Collaborative Filtering (CF) models. The intuition is to exploit neighbors with similar preferences for bridging unseen user-item pairs and alleviating data sparseness. Many existing…
Social categorizations divide people into "us" and "them," often along continuous attributes such as political ideology or skin color. This division results in both positive consequences, such as a sense of community, and negative ones,…
Generating models from large data sets -- and determining which subsets of data to mine -- is becoming increasingly automated. However choosing what data to collect in the first place requires human intuition or experience, usually supplied…
The spatial panel regression model has shown great success in modelling econometric and other types of data that are observed both spatially and temporally with associated predictor variables. However, model checking via testing for spatial…
How well do demographics explain party identification? Demographics are related to party identification in political polls, news articles, and academic publications. Yet, there is a diversity of party identification even within demographic…
We present a model for quantitatively identifying swing voters in congressional elections. This is achieved by predicting an individual voter's likelihood to vote and an individual voter's likelihood to vote for a given party, if he votes.…
With the increasing popularity of location-based social media applications and devices that automatically tag generated content with locations, large repositories of collaborative geo-referenced data are appearing on-line. Efficiently…
Finding neighbourhood structures is very useful in extracting valuable relationships among data samples. This paper presents a survey of recent neighbourhood construction algorithms for pattern clustering and classifying data points.…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
Data on neighbourhood characteristics are not typically collected in epidemiological studies. They are however useful in the study of small-area health inequalities. Neighbourhood characteristics are collected in some surveys and could be…
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…
Urban development is shaped by historical, geographical, and economic factors, presenting challenges for planners in understanding urban form. This study models commute flows across multiple U.S. cities, uncovering consistent patterns in…
The social connections people form online affect the quality of information they receive and their online experience. Although a host of socioeconomic and cognitive factors were implicated in the formation of offline social ties, few of…