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Topology, Geometry and Data Seminar: Daryl DeFord

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September 26, 2019
2:10 pm - 3:10 pm
MBI Auditorium, Jennings Hall 355

Daryl DeFord

Postdocoral Associate, Geometric Data Processing Group, MIT (CSAIL)


The problem of constructing "fair'' political districts and the related problem of detecting intentional gerrymandering has received a significant amount of attention in recent years. A key problem in this area is determining the expected properties of a representative districting plan as a function of the input geographic and demographic data. A natural approach is to generate a comparison ensemble of plans using MCMC and I will present successful applications of this approach in both court cases and legislative reform efforts. However, our recent work has demonstrated that the commonly used boundary-node flip proposal can mix poorly on real-world examples. In this talk, I will present some new proposal distributions for this setting and discuss some related open problems concerning mixing times and spanning trees. I will also discuss some generic hardness results for sampling problems on partitions of planar graphs.

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