Related papers: Congressional Districting: "Rocks-Pebbles-Sand"
With the increased use of machine learning systems for decision making, questions about the fairness properties of such systems start to take center stage. Most existing work on algorithmic fairness assume complete observation of features…
The immense amount of daily generated and communicated data presents unique challenges in their processing. Clustering, the grouping of data without the presence of ground-truth labels, is an important tool for drawing inferences from data.…
Learning from many real-world datasets is limited by a problem called the class imbalance problem. A dataset is imbalanced when one class (the majority class) has significantly more samples than the other class (the minority class). Such…
We investigate a new sampling scheme aimed at improving the performance of particle filters whenever (a) there is a significant mismatch between the assumed model dynamics and the actual system, or (b) the posterior probability tends to…
We develop a Multi-Scale Merge-Split Markov chain on redistricting plans. The chain is designed to be usable as the proposal in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Sampling the space of plans amounts to dividing a graph into a…
Changes in political geography and electoral district boundaries shape representation in the United States Congress. To disentangle the effects of geography and gerrymandering, we generate a large ensemble of alternative redistricting plans…
Choices made by individuals have widespread impacts--for instance, people choose between political candidates to vote for, between social media posts to share, and between brands to purchase--moreover, data on these choices are increasingly…
Machine learning systems are increasingly being used to make impactful decisions such as loan applications and criminal justice risk assessments, and as such, ensuring fairness of these systems is critical. This is often challenging as the…
In representative democracy, a redistricting map is chosen to partition an electorate into districts which each elects a representative. A valid redistricting map must satisfy a collection of constraints such as being compact, contiguous,…
The popular K-means clustering algorithm potentially suffers from a major weakness for further analysis or interpretation. Some cluster may have disproportionately more (or fewer) points from one of the subpopulations in terms of some…
Nowadays, many decisions are made using predictive models built on historical data.Predictive models may systematically discriminate groups of people even if the computing process is fair and well-intentioned. Discrimination-aware data…
The application of data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques in the field of diagnostics is not a new concept, and these techniques have been very successfully applied in a variety of applications, especially in…
Neural collaborative filtering is the state of art field in the recommender systems area; it provides some models that obtain accurate predictions and recommendations. These models are regression-based, and they just return rating…
This paper investigates why and when the edge-based districting problem becomes computationally intractable. The overall problem is represented as an exact mathematical programming formulation consisting of an objective function and several…
Fairness in data-driven decision-making studies scenarios where individuals from certain population segments may be unfairly treated when being considered for loan or job applications, access to public resources, or other types of services.…
In a standard classification framework a set of trustworthy learning data are employed to build a decision rule, with the final aim of classifying unlabelled units belonging to the test set. Therefore, unreliable labelled observations,…
The Political Districting Problem is mapped to a $q$-state Potts model in which the constraints can be written as interactions between sites or external fields acting on the system. Districting into $q$ voter districts is equivalent to…
In recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
Hurricanes and, more generally, tropical cyclones (TCs) are rare, complex natural phenomena of both scientific and public interest. The importance of understanding TCs in a changing climate has increased as recent TCs have had devastating…
We present a novel approach to the measurement of American state legislature polarization with an experimental comparison of three different machine learning algorithms. Our approach strictly relies on public data sources and open source…