Title: The Geometry of Gerrymandering
Speaker: Thomas Weighill (UNC Greensboro)
Speaker's URL: https://sites.google.com/view/thomasweighill/
Abstract: Redistricting refers to the process of dividing a state into districts for the purpose of electing representatives. The recent rise of methods for generating large ensembles of possible redistricting plans has led to a need for methods which can visualize and analyze collection of partitions. In this talk we will show how (Wasserstein) barycenters allow us to average and align an ensemble, which in turn helps us to identify and characterize outliers (which could be gerrymanders). We will also show how this approach can be applied to more general partition datasets, using clustering as an example. This is joint work with Tom Needham.
URL associated with Seminar: https://tgda.osu.edu/activities/tdga-seminar/
