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Markov chain Monte Carlo is an inherently serial algorithm. Although likelihood calculations for individual steps can sometimes be parallelized, the serial evolution of the process is widely viewed as incompatible with parallelization,…
The space of connected graph partitions underlies statistical models used as evidence in court cases and reform efforts that analyze political districting plans. In response to the demands of redistricting applications, researchers have…
We present a new statistical test to detect that a presented state of a reversible Markov chain was not chosen from a stationary distribution. In particular, given a value function for the states of the Markov chain, we would like to…
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…
In this paper, we propose to use the concept of local fairness for auditing and ranking redistricting plans. Given a redistricting plan, a deviating group is a population-balanced contiguous region in which a majority of individuals are of…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
Congressional district lines in many U.S. states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is a widely-used technique for generating a dependent sequence of samples from complex distributions. Conventionally, these methods require a source of independent random variates. Most implementations use…
This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…
We propose new methods of electoral statistics. With their help, we study transcripts of vote counting in municipal elections. We construct and apply effective statistical tests to detect the ballot stuffing at the level of individual…
Simulated annealing solves global optimization problems by means of a random walk in a cooling energy landscape based on the objective function and a temperature parameter. However, if the temperature is decreased too quickly, this…
Filtering---estimating the state of a partially observable Markov process from a sequence of observations---is one of the most widely studied problems in control theory, AI, and computational statistics. Exact computation of the posterior…
Metaheuristics, as the simulated annealing used in the optimization of disordered systems, goes beyond physics, and the traveling salesman is a paradigmatic NP-complete problem that allows inferring important theoretical properties of the…
The population annealing algorithm is a population-based equilibrium version of simulated annealing. It can sample thermodynamic systems with rough free-energy landscapes more efficiently than standard Markov chain Monte Carlo alone. A…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms have important applications in counting problems and in machine learning problems, settings that involve estimating quantities that are difficult to compute exactly. How much can quantum computers speed…
We describe a general strategy for sampling configurations from a given distribution, NOT based on the standard Metropolis (Markov chain) strategy. It uses the fact that nontrivial problems in statistical physics are high dimensional and…
In 2016, a Wisconsin court struck down the state assembly map due to unconstitutional gerrymandering. If this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court's pending 2018 decision, it will be the fist successful political gerrymandering case in the…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
Generating random variates from high-dimensional distributions is often done approximately using Markov chain Monte Carlo. In certain cases, perfect simulation algorithms exist that allow one to draw exactly from the stationary…
Computing smoothing distributions, the distributions of one or more states conditional on past, present, and future observations is a recurring problem when operating on general hidden Markov models. The aim of this paper is to provide a…