Related papers: Evaluating District-based Election Surveys with Sy…
Sampling from the posterior is a key technical problem in Bayesian statistics. Rigorous guarantees are difficult to obtain for Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms of common use. In this paper, we study an alternative class of algorithms…
Traditional survey-based political issue polling is becoming less tractable due to increasing costs and risk of bias associated with growing non-response rates and declining coverage of key demographic groups. With researchers and pollsters…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
Election results are determined by numerous social factors that affect the formation of opinion of the voters, including the network of interactions between them and the dynamics of opinion influence. In this work we study the result of…
Surveys provide important evidence for policymaking, decision-making, and understanding of society. However, conducting the large surveys required to provide subpopulation level estimates is expensive and time-consuming. Multilevel…
Mutual information is widely used, in a descriptive way, to measure the stochastic dependence of categorical random variables. In order to address questions such as the reliability of the descriptive value, one must consider…
In the process of redistricting, one important metric is the number of competitive districts, that is, districts where both parties have a reasonable chance of winning a majority of votes. Competitive districts are important for achieving…
In this paper we extend some recent results on an operatorial approach to the description of alliances between political parties interacting among themselves and with a basin of electors. In particular, we propose and compare three…
Several official statistics agencies release synthetic data as public use microdata files. In practice, synthetic data do not admit accurate results for every analysis. Thus, it is beneficial for agencies to provide users with feedback on…
An exploit of the Sequential Importance Sampling (SIS) algorithm using Differential Algebra (DA) techniques is derived to develop an efficient particle filter. The filter creates an original kind of particles, called scout particles, that…
In this paper we study the impact of news media and public surveys on the electoral campaigns for political competitions. We present an agent-based model that addresses the effective influence of surveys in orienting the opinions of voters…
Standard regression approaches assume that some finite number of the response distribution characteristics, such as location and scale, change as a (parametric or nonparametric) function of predictors. However, it is not always appropriate…
The U.S. Census Bureau provides an estimate of the true population as a supplement to the basic census numbers. This estimate is constructed from data in a post-censal survey. The overall procedure is referred to as dual system estimation.…
Elections where electors rank the candidates (or a subset of the candidates) in order of preference allow the collection of more information about the electors' intent. The most widely used election of this type is Instant-Runoff Voting…
A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the…
In the design and analysis of political redistricting maps, it is often useful to be able to sample from the space of all partitions of the graph of census blocks into connected subgraphs of equal population. There are influential Markov…
Voter fraud in the United States is rare and the vote-counting system is robust against tampering, but there remains widespread distrust in the security of election infrastructure among the public. We consider statistical means of detecting…
We study a model of temporal voting where there is a fixed time horizon, and at each round the voters report their preferences over the available candidates and a single candidate is selected. Prior work has adapted popular notions of…
We consider the problem of model-based clustering in the presence of many correlated, mixed continuous and discrete variables, some of which may have missing values. Discrete variables are treated with a latent continuous variable approach…
Dirichlet distributions are commonly used for modeling vectors in a probability simplex. When used as a prior or a proposal distribution, it is natural to set the mean of a Dirichlet to be equal to the location where one wants the…