SIAM Student Chapter Seminar
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- When: Every other Friday at 1:30 pm
- Where: B333 Van Vleck Hall
- Organizers: Xiao Shen
- Faculty advisers: Jean-Luc Thiffeault, Steve Wright
- To join the SIAM Chapter mailing list: email [join-siam-chapter@lists.wisc.edu].
Spring 2020
| date | speaker | title |
|---|---|---|
| Sept. 27, Oct. 4 | Lorenzo Najt (Math) | Ensemble methods for measuring gerrymandering: Algorithmic problems and inferential challenges |
Abstracts
Jan 31, Lorenzo Najt (Math)
Ensemble methods for measuring gerrymandering: Algorithmic problems and inferential challenges
We will review some recent work regarding measuring gerrymandering by sampling from the space of maps, including two methods used in a recent amicus brief to the supreme court. This discussion will highlight some of the computational challenges of this approach, including some complexity-theory lower bounds and bottlenecks in Markov chains. We will examine the robustness of these statistical methods through their connection to phase transitions in the self-avoiding walk model, as well as their dependence on artifacts of discretization. This talk is largely based on https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08881