Related papers: Congressional Districting: "Rocks-Pebbles-Sand"
Participatory budgeting is a method used by city governments to select public projects to fund based on residents' votes. Many cities use participatory budgeting at a district level. Typically, a budget is divided among districts…
In the United States as in other countries, political and economic divisions cut along geographic and demographic lines. Richer people are more likely to vote for Republican candidates while poorer voters lean Democratic; this is consistent…
Citizen science databases that consist of volunteer-led sampling efforts of species communities are relied on as essential sources of data in ecology. Summarizing such data across counties with frequentist-valid prediction sets for each…
Decision-making problems often feature uncertainty stemming from heterogeneous and context-dependent human preferences. To address this, we propose a sequential learning-and-optimization pipeline to learn preference distributions and…
Research has shown that, machine learning models might inherit and propagate undesired social biases encoded in the data. To address this problem, fair training algorithms are developed. However, most algorithms assume we know…
The robustness of image segmentation has been an important research topic in the past few years as segmentation models have reached production-level accuracy. However, like classification models, segmentation models can be vulnerable to…
Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan…
Structured high-cardinality data arises in many domains, and poses a major challenge for both modeling and inference. Graphical models are a popular approach to modeling structured data but they are unsuitable for high-cardinality…
Distributed algorithms and theories are called for in this era of big data. Under weaker local signal-to-noise ratios, we improve upon the celebrated one-round distributed principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm designed in the spirit…
In this article, bipartite ranking, a statistical learning problem involved in many applications and widely studied in the passive context, is approached in a much more general \textit{active setting} than the discrete one previously…
Nearest neighbor (k-NN) graphs are widely used in machine learning and data mining applications, and our aim is to better understand what they reveal about the cluster structure of the unknown underlying distribution of points. Moreover, is…
The issue of fairness in machine learning stems from the fact that historical data often displays biases against specific groups of people which have been underprivileged in the recent past, or still are. In this context, one of the…
We study the computational complexity of the map redistricting problem (gerrymandering). Mathematically, the electoral district designer (gerrymanderer) attempts to partition a weighted graph into $k$ connected components (districts) such…
Gerrymandering is the perversion of an election based on manipulation of voting district boundaries, and has been a historically important yet difficult task to analytically prove. We propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo with Simulated…
Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are…
Classification and Regression Trees (CARTs) are off-the-shelf techniques in modern Statistics and Machine Learning. CARTs are traditionally built by means of a greedy procedure, sequentially deciding the splitting predictor variable(s) and…
We study the setting of committee elections, where a group of individuals needs to collectively select a given size subset of available objects. This model is relevant for a number of real-life scenarios including political elections,…
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been used efficiently in several fields, including environmental challenges. In fact, CNN can help with the monitoring of marine litter, which has become a worldwide problem. UAVs have higher…
Deep learning based image segmentation methods have achieved great success, even having human-level accuracy in some applications. However, due to the black box nature of deep learning, the best method may fail in some situations. Thus…
Nonignorable missing outcomes are common in real world datasets and often require strong parametric assumptions to achieve identification. These assumptions can be implausible or untestable, and so we may forgo them in favour of partially…