Related papers: Congressional Districting: "Rocks-Pebbles-Sand"
Connecticut passed their new state House of Representatives district plan on November 18, 2021 and passed their new state Senate district plan on November 23, 2021. Each passed unanimously in their 9-person bipartisan Reapportionment…
Most US school districts draw geographic "attendance zones" to assign children to schools based on their home address, a process that can replicate existing neighborhood racial/ethnic and socioeconomic status (SES) segregation in schools.…
The epidemiology of pandemics is classically viewed using geographical and political borders; however, these artificial divisions can result in a misunderstanding of the current epidemiological state within a given region. To improve upon…
We introduce a method for jointly registering ensembles of partitioned datasets in a way which is both geometrically coherent and partition-aware. Once such a registration has been defined, one can group partition blocks across datasets in…
Clustering is considered a non-supervised learning setting, in which the goal is to partition a collection of data points into disjoint clusters. Often a bound $k$ on the number of clusters is given or assumed by the practitioner. Many…
As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation…
Switching from one electoral system to another one is frequently criticized by the opposition and is viewed as a means for the ruling party to stay in power. In particular, when the new electoral system is a parallel voting (or a…
We model the societal task of redistricting political districts as a partitioning problem: Given a set of $n$ points in the plane, each belonging to one of two parties, and a parameter $k$, our goal is to compute a partition $\Pi$ of the…
With the current ongoing debate about fairness, explainability and transparency of machine learning models, their application in high-impact clinical decision-making systems must be scrutinized. We consider a real-life example of risk…
Spectral clustering became a popular choice for data clustering for its ability of uncovering clusters of different shapes. However, it is not always preferable over other clustering methods due to its computational demands. One of the…
Notwithstanding the popularity of conventional clustering algorithms such as K-means and probabilistic clustering, their clustering results are sensitive to the presence of outliers in the data. Even a few outliers can compromise the…
Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a popular approach to study marginalized or hard-to-reach populations. It collects samples from a networked population by incentivizing participants to refer their friends into the study. One major…
This paper uses and recycles data from a third-party digital marketing firm, to explore how targeted ads contribute to larger systems of racial discrimination. Focusing on a case study of targeted ads for educational searches in New York…
Existing machine learning models have proven to fail when it comes to their performance for minority groups, mainly due to biases in data. In particular, datasets, especially social data, are often not representative of minorities. In this…
The colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
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…
Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which…
Fine resolution estimates of demographic and socioeconomic attributes are crucial for planning and policy development. While several efforts have been made to produce fine-scale gridded population estimates, socioeconomic features are…
This paper considers a canonical clustering problem where one receives unlabeled samples drawn from a balanced mixture of two elliptical distributions and aims for a classifier to estimate the labels. Many popular methods including PCA and…
We investigate optimization models for the purpose of computational redistricting. Our focus is on nonconvex objectives for estimating expected Black Representatives and Political Representation. The objectives are a composition of a ratio…