论文标题
多尺度合并斯普利特马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛用于重新分配
Multi-Scale Merge-Split Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Redistricting
论文作者
论文摘要
我们在重新分区计划上开发了一个多尺度合并分解马尔可夫链。该链被设计为马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛(MCMC)算法中的提案。采样计划的空间等于将图形分为分区,其中每个元素都与其他地区相对应。这些地区满足了一系列硬性约束,并且可以根据许多其他标准加权措施。多尺度算法类似于我们先前开发的合并分布提案,但是,该算法提供了改进的缩放属性,还可以用于保留嵌套的感兴趣群落,例如县和区域。两项作品都使用一项提案,该提案扩展了利用跨越树木合并和拆分区的重点算法。在这项工作中,我们扩展了状态空间,以便每个地区都由树木的层次结构定义。从这个意义上讲,这两种算法的提议步骤都可以看作是“森林卷积”。我们还将状态空间扩展到包括链接指定区域的边缘,从而进一步提高了我们算法的计算效率。 MCMC算法采样的计划收集可以用作比较特定关注计划的基线。如果给定计划的种族或党派素质与计划收集的典型计划不同,则给定计划可能已经浮出水面并被标记为异常值。
We develop a Multi-Scale Merge-Split Markov chain on redistricting plans. The chain is designed to be usable as the proposal in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Sampling the space of plans amounts to dividing a graph into a partition with a specified number of elements which each correspond to a different district. The districts satisfy a collection of hard constraints and the measure may be weighted with regard to a number of other criteria. The multi-scale algorithm is similar to our previously developed Merge-Split proposal, however, this algorithm provides improved scaling properties and may also be used to preserve nested communities of interest such as counties and precincts. Both works use a proposal which extends the ReCom algorithm which leveraged spanning trees merge and split districts. In this work we extend the state space so that each district is defined by a hierarchy of trees. In this sense, the proposal step in both algorithms can be seen as a "Forest ReCom." We also expand the state space to include edges that link specified districts, which further improves the computational efficiency of our algorithm. The collection of plans sampled by the MCMC algorithm can serve as a baseline against which a particular plan of interest is compared. If a given plan has different racial or partisan qualities than what is typical of the collection of plans, the given plan may have been gerrymandered and is labeled as an outlier.