Related papers: On the Complexity of Sampling Redistricting Plans
A spatially distributed system contains a large amount of agents with limited sensing, data processing, and communication capabilities. Recent technological advances have opened up possibilities to deploy spatially distributed systems for…
After every U.S. national census, a state legislature is required to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts in order to account for changes in population. At the moment this is done in a highly partisan way, with districting done…
Redistricting is the process by which electoral district boundaries are drawn, and a common normative assumption in this process is that districts should be drawn so as to capture coherent communities of interest (COIs). While states rely…
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 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…
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 --…
Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…
A number of problems in a variety of fields are characterised by target distributions with a multimodal structure in which the presence of several isolated local maxima dramatically reduces the efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
Directed acyclic graphs are the basic representation of the structure underlying Bayesian networks, which represent multivariate probability distributions. In many practical applications, such as the reverse engineering of gene regulatory…
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…
A recurring challenge in the application of redistricting simulation algorithms lies in extracting useful summaries and comparisons from a large ensemble of districting plans. Researchers often compute summary statistics for each district…
In this paper, we consider the problem of subsampling and reconstruction of signals that reside on the vertices of a product graph, such as sensor network time series, genomic signals, or product ratings in a social network. Specifically,…
We present an algorithm that efficiently computes nearly-optimal solutions to a class of combinatorial reconfiguration problems on weighted, undirected graphs. Inspired by societally relevant applications in networked infrastructure…
For many probability distributions of interest, it is quite difficult to obtain samples efficiently. Often, Markov chains are employed to obtain approximately random samples from these distributions. The primary drawback to traditional…
This work provides a new multinomial resampling procedure for particle filter resampling, focused on the case where the number of samples required is less than or equal to the size of the underlying discrete distribution. This setting is…
Subpopulation shift exists widely in many real-world applications, which refers to the training and test distributions that contain the same subpopulation groups but with different subpopulation proportions. Ignoring subpopulation shifts…
A resampling scheme provides a way to switch low-weight particles for sequential Monte Carlo with higher-weight particles representing the objective distribution. The less the variance of the weight distribution is, the more concentrated…
This paper is concerned with function reconstruction from samples. The sampling points used in several approaches are (1) structured points connected with fast algorithms or (2) unstructured points coming from, e.g., an initial random draw…
Sampling from combinatorial families can be difficult. However, complicated families can often be embedded within larger, simpler ones, for which easy sampling algorithms are known. We take advantage of such a relationship to describe a…
In this paper, we prove intractability results about sampling from the set of partitions of a planar graph into connected components. Our proofs are motivated by a technique introduced by Jerrum, Valiant, and Vazirani. Moreover, we use…