Related papers: Empirical Power Analysis of a Statistical Test to …
For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…
This preprint offers a detailed look, both qualitative and quantitative, at districting with respect to recent voting patterns in one state: Pennsylvania. We investigate how much the partisan playing field is tilted by political geography.…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
Ensembles of random legislative districts are a valuable tool for assessing whether a proposed district plan is an outlier or gerrymander. Expert witnesses have presented these in litigation using various methods, and unsurprisingly, they…
Bayesian hypothesis tests leverage posterior probabilities, Bayes factors, or credible intervals to inform data-driven decision making. We propose a framework for power curve approximation with such hypothesis tests. We present a fast…
Computing the marginal likelihood or evidence is one of the core challenges in Bayesian analysis. While there are many established methods for estimating this quantity, they predominantly rely on using a large number of posterior samples…
Consider a random vector $(X,Y)$ and let $m(x)=E(Y|X=x)$. We are interested in testing $H_0:m\in {\cal M}_{\Theta,{\cal G}}=\{\gamma(\cdot,\theta,g):\theta \in \Theta,g\in {\cal G}\}$ for some known function $\gamma$, some compact set…
In the multiple regression model we prove that the coefficient t-test for a variable of interest is uniformly most powerful unbiased, with the other parameters considered nuisance. The proof is based on the theory of tests with…
In many scientific problems, researchers try to relate a response variable $Y$ to a set of potential explanatory variables $X = (X_1,\dots,X_p)$, and start by trying to identify variables that contribute to this relationship. In statistical…
Decision trees are commonly used predictive models due to their flexibility and interpretability. This paper is directed at quantifying the uncertainty of decision tree predictions by employing a Bayesian inference approach. This is…
This study explores the impact of class outliers on the effectiveness of example-based explainability methods for black-box machine learning models. We reformulate existing explainability evaluation metrics, such as correctness and…
Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) extend the scope of Bayesian inference to models for which the likelihood function is intractable. Although these developments allow us to estimate model parameters, other basic problems…
While manipulative attacks on elections have been well-studied, only recently has attention turned to attacks that account for geographic information, which are extremely common in the real world. The most well known in the media is…
The use of heuristics to assess the convergence and compress the output of Markov chain Monte Carlo can be sub-optimal in terms of the empirical approximations that are produced. Typically a number of the initial states are attributed to…
Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators' preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are…
The detection and quantification of narrow emission lines in X-ray spectra is a challenging statistical task. The Poisson nature of the photon counts leads to local random fluctuations in the observed spectrum that often results in excess…
Log-linear models are widely used to express the association in multivariate frequency data on contingency tables. The paper focuses on the power analysis for testing the goodness-of-fit hypothesis for this model type. Conventionally, for…
The space of connected graph partitions underlies statistical models used as evidence in court cases and reform efforts that analyze political districting plans. In response to the demands of redistricting applications, researchers have…
We discuss difficulties of evaluating partisan gerrymandering in the congressional districts in Utah and the failure of many common metrics in Utah. We explain why the Republican vote share in the least-Republican district (LRVS) is a good…
We introduce a non-partisan probability distribution on congressional redistricting of North Carolina which emphasizes the equal partition of the population and the compactness of districts. When random districts are drawn and the results…