Related papers: Congressional Districting: "Rocks-Pebbles-Sand"
Gerrymandering is a long-standing issue within the U.S. political system, and it has received scrutiny recently by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this note, we prove that deciding whether there exists a fair redistricting among legal maps is…
Motivated by the problem of partisan gerrymandering, we introduce an electoral system for a representative democracy called democratic cellular voting, designed to make modern packing and cracking strategies irrelevant by allowing districts…
Consensus clustering aggregates partitions in order to find a better fit by reconciling clustering results from different sources/executions. In practice, there exist noise and outliers in clustering task, which, however, may significantly…
Fairness-aware mining of massive data streams is a growing and challenging concern in the contemporary domain of machine learning. Many stream learning algorithms are used to replace humans at critical decision-making points e.g., hiring…
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.…
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.…
Gerrymandering, the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is a persistent issue in U.S. redistricting cycles. This paper introduces and analyzes a new phenomenon, 'votemandering'- a strategic…
Online advertising on platforms such as Google or Facebook has become an indispensable outreach tool, including for applications where it is desirable to engage different demographics in an equitable fashion, such as hiring, housing, civic…
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…
Graph labelling is a key activity of network science, with broad practical applications, and close relations to other network science tasks, such as community detection and clustering. While a large body of work exists on both unsupervised…
In the past two decades, open access to news and information has increased rapidly, empowering educated political growth within democratic societies. News recommender systems (NRSs) have shown to be useful in this process, minimizing…
Recent methods for boundary or edge detection built on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) typically suffer from the issue of predicted edges being thick and need post-processing to obtain crisp boundaries. Highly imbalanced…
Traditionally, the problem of apportioning the seats of a legislative body has been viewed as a one-shot process with no dynamic considerations. While this approach is reasonable for some settings, dynamic aspects play an important role in…
We consider chance-constrained problems with discrete random distribution. We aim for problems with a large number of scenarios. We propose a novel method based on the stochastic gradient descent method which performs updates of the…
Clustering algorithms are widely used in many societal resource allocation applications, such as loan approvals and candidate recruitment, among others, and hence, biased or unfair model outputs can adversely impact individuals that rely on…
Generating realistic artificial preference distributions is an important part of any simulation analysis of electoral systems. While this has been discussed in some detail in the context of a single electoral district, many electoral…
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…
Algorithms deployed in education can shape the learning experience and success of a student. It is therefore important to understand whether and how such algorithms might create inequalities or amplify existing biases. In this paper, we…
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning techniques for the estimation of treatment effects. Most of the best-performing methods rely on representation learning strategies that encourage shared behavior…
The construction of deprivation indices is complicated by the inherent ambiguity in defining deprivation as well as the potential for partisan manipulation. Nevertheless, deprivation indices provide an essential tool for mitigating the…