Related papers: On the reliability of voting processes: the Mexica…
We consider a model of unreliable or crowdsourced data where there is an underlying set of $n$ binary variables, each evaluator contributes a (possibly unreliable or adversarial) estimate of the values of some subset of $r$ of the…
We look at the distribution of the Bayesian evidence for mock realizations of supernova and baryon acoustic oscillation data. The ratios of Bayesian evidences of different models are often used to perform model selection. The significance…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
A multicomponent random process used as a model for the problem of space-time earthquake prediction; this allows us to develop consistent estimation for conditional probabilities of large earthquakes if the values of the predictor…
With the increasing frequency of major natural disasters, understanding their political consequences is of paramount importance for democratic accountability. The existing literature is deeply divided, with some studies finding that voters…
Multi-winner voting is the process of selecting a fixed-size set of representative candidates based on voters' preferences. It occurs in applications ranging from politics (parliamentary elections) to the design of modern computer…
Issue salience is a major determinant in voters' decisions. Candidates and political parties campaign to shift salience to their advantage - a process termed priming. We study the dynamics, strategies and equilibria of campaign spending for…
Mexico has experienced a notable surge in assassinations of political candidates and mayors. This article argues that these killings are largely driven by organized crime, aiming to influence candidate selection, control local governments…
We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…
In the months leading up to political elections in the United States, forecasts are widespread and take on multiple forms, including projections of what party will win the popular vote, state ratings, and predictions of vote margins at the…
Fairness in multiwinner elections is studied in varying contexts. For instance, diversity of candidates and representation of voters are both separately termed as being fair. A common denominator to ensure fairness across all such contexts…
The concept of Probability of Causation (PC) is critically important in legal contexts and can help in many other domains. While it has been around since 1986, current operationalizations can obtain only the minimum and maximum values of…
While the traditional viewpoint in machine learning and statistics assumes training and testing samples come from the same population, practice belies this fiction. One strategy -- coming from robust statistics and optimization -- is thus…
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…
Standard random-effects meta-analysis methods perform poorly when applied to few studies only. Such settings however are commonly encountered in practice. It is unclear, whether or to what extent small-sample-size behaviour can be improved…
Gerrymandering is a pervasive problem within the US political system. In the past decade, methods based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and statistical outlier tests have been proposed to quantify gerrymandering and were used as…
The availability of large datasets requires an improved view on statistical laws in complex systems, such as Zipf's law of word frequencies, the Gutenberg-Richter law of earthquake magnitudes, or scale-free degree distribution in networks.…
In the study of phase transitions a very few models are accessible to exact solution. In the most cases analytical simplifications have to be done or some numerical technique has to be used to get insight about their critical properties.…
It is well known that no reasonable voting rule is strategyproof. Moreover, the common Plurality rule is particularly prone to strategic behavior of the voters and empirical studies show that people often vote strategically in practice.…
Most work on manipulation assumes that all preferences are known to the manipulators. However, in many settings elections are open and sequential, and manipulators may know the already cast votes but may not know the future votes. We…