Related papers: A $k$-medoids Approach to Exploring Districting Pl…
Redistricting is the problem of dividing a state into a number $k$ of regions, called districts. Voters in each district elect a representative. The primary criteria are: each district is connected, district populations are equal (or nearly…
In this paper we propose an online approximate k-nn graph building algorithm, which is able to quickly update a k-nn graph using a flow of data points. One very important step of the algorithm consists in using the current distributed graph…
We develop effective methods for constructing an ensemble of district plans via independent sampling from a reasonable probability distribution on the space of graph partitions. We compare the performance of our algorithms to that of…
Balanced partitioning is often a crucial first step in solving large-scale graph optimization problems, e.g., in some cases, a big graph can be chopped into pieces that fit on one machine to be processed independently before stitching the…
The most commonly used method to tackle the graph partitioning problem in practice is the multilevel approach. During a coarsening phase, a multilevel graph partitioning algorithm reduces the graph size by iteratively contracting nodes and…
In redistricting litigation, effective enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has often involved providing the court with districting plans that display a larger number of majority-minority districts than the current proposal (as was true,…
The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…
Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM, k-Medoids) is a popular clustering technique to use with arbitrary distance functions or similarities, where each cluster is represented by its most central object, called the medoid or the discrete median.…
We study the NP-hard Fair Connected Districting problem recently proposed by Stoica et al. [AAMAS 2020]: Partition a vertex-colored graph into k connected components (subsequently referred to as districts) so that in every district the most…
Graph partition is a key component to achieve workload balance and reduce job completion time in parallel graph processing systems. Among the various partition strategies, edge partition has demonstrated more promising performance in…
Discovering the underlying structure of a given graph is one of the fundamental goals in graph mining. Given a graph, we can often order vertices in a way that neighboring vertices have a higher probability of being connected to each other.…
Partitioning a region into districts to favor a particular candidate or a party is commonly known as gerrymandering. In this paper, we investigate the gerrymandering problem in graph theoretic setting as proposed by Cohen-Zemach et al.…
We introduce and study the problem of balanced districting, where given an undirected graph with vertices carrying two types of weights (different population, resource types, etc) the goal is to maximize the total weights covered in vertex…
Given a graph $G = (V,E)$ with vertex weights $w(v)$ and a desired number of parts $k$, the goal in graph partitioning problems is to partition the vertex set V into parts $V_1,\ldots,V_k$. Metrics for compactness, contiguity, and balance…
k-medoids algorithm is a partitional, centroid-based clustering algorithm which uses pairwise distances of data points and tries to directly decompose the dataset with $n$ points into a set of $k$ disjoint clusters. However, k-medoids…
Computing high-quality graph partitions is a challenging problem with numerous applications. In this paper, we present a novel meta-heuristic for the balanced graph partitioning problem. Our approach is based on integer linear programs that…
In the United States, regions are frequently divided into districts for the purpose of electing representatives. How the districts are drawn can affect who's elected, and drawing districts to give an advantage to a certain group is known as…
When auditing a redistricting plan, a persuasive method is to compare the plan with an ensemble of neutrally drawn redistricting plans. Ensembles are generated via algorithms that sample distributions on balanced graph partitions. To audit…
This paper introduces k-splits, an improved hierarchical algorithm based on k-means to cluster data without prior knowledge of the number of clusters. K-splits starts from a small number of clusters and uses the most significant data…
We propose a method for redistricting, decomposing a geographical area into subareas, called districts, so that the populations of the districts are as close as possible and the districts are compact and contiguous. Each district is the…