Related papers: Sampling-based techniques for designing school bou…
Modern sampling methods create ensembles of district maps that score well on discrete compactness scores, whereas the Polsby-Popper and other shape-based scores remain highly relevant for building fair maps and litigating unfair ones. The…
The American winner-take-all congressional district system empowers politicians to engineer electoral outcomes by manipulating district boundaries. Existing computational solutions mostly focus on drawing unbiased maps by ignoring political…
Sampling-based motion planners have experienced much success due to their ability to efficiently and evenly explore the state space. However, for many tasks, it may be more efficient to not uniformly explore the state space, especially when…
Clever sampling methods can be used to improve the handling of big data and increase its usefulness. The subject of this study is remote sensing, specifically airborne laser scanning point clouds representing different classes of ground…
This paper presents a general-purpose formulation of a large class of discrete-time planning problems, with hybrid state and control-spaces, as factored transition systems. Factoring allows state transitions to be described as the…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
Several approximate policy iteration schemes without value functions, which focus on policy representation using classifiers and address policy learning as a supervised learning problem, have been proposed recently. Finding good policies…
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, three theoretical principles are formalized: randomization, overrepresentation and restriction. We develop these principles and give a rationale for their use in choosing the sampling design in a…
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
Redistricting efforts have gathered contemporary attention in both popular and scholarly debates, particularly in the United States where efforts to redraw congressional districts to favor either of the two major parties in 12 states --…
We study the computational complexity of the map redistricting problem (gerrymandering). Mathematically, the electoral district designer (gerrymanderer) attempts to partition a weighted graph into $k$ connected components (districts) such…
Gerrymandering is a practice of manipulating district boundaries and locations in order to achieve a political advantage for a particular party. Lewenberg, Lev, and Rosenschein [AAMAS 2017] initiated the algorithmic study of a…
Sampling-based algorithms are widely used for motion planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces. However, due to low sampling efficiency, their performance often diminishes in complex configuration spaces with narrow corridors.…
Sampling is a fundamental problem in computer science and statistics. However, for a given task and stream, it is often not possible to choose good sampling probabilities in advance. We derive a general framework for adaptively changing the…
Why not have a computer just draw a map? This is something you hear a lot when people talk about gerrymandering, and it's easy to think at first that this could solve redistricting altogether. But there are more than a couple problems with…
This article introduces the 50stateSimulations, a collection of simulated congressional districting plans and underlying code developed by the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project. The 50stateSimulations allow for…
The number of sampling methods could be daunting for a practitioner looking to cast powerful machine learning methods to their specific problem. This paper takes a theoretical stance to review and organize many sampling approaches in the…
Sampling-based methods such as ReCom are widely used to audit redistricting plans for fairness, with the balanced spanning tree distribution playing a central role since it favors compact, contiguous, and population-balanced districts.…
Ensemble analysis has become an important tool for quantifying gerrymandering; the main idea is to generate a large, random sample of districting plans (an "ensemble") to which any proposed plan may be compared. If a proposed plan is an…
American democracy is currently heavily reliant on plurality in single-member districts, or PSMD, as a system of election. But public perceptions of fairness are often keyed to partisan proportionality, or the degree of congruence between…