CISER Workshop w/ Daryl Deford: analyzing gerrymandering in political redistricting with GerryChain.

About the event

The Center for Interdisciplinary Statistical Education and Research is pleased to announce that we are hosting a workshop with Dr. Daryl Deford on Wednesday (March 27th) from 4:00-5:30pm on the Pullman WSU Campus in ADBF 1002. Dr. Deford’s workshop is titled: analyzing gerrymandering in political redistricting with GerryChain. He has provided the following description:

Over the last decade, mathematical, statistical, and computational analysis of redistricting plans using Markov chain ensemble methods has been a key feature of court cases and public policy discussions. In this workshop you will get a hands-on introduction to building ensembles of districting plans for analyzing gerrymandering using the state-of-the-art GerryChain software library. We will also discuss and implement the geospatial data processing necessary to perform this kind of analysis using the MAUP package.

GerryChain is most used in the Python language (here). This will be a relatively hands on workshop, so it is a good idea to bring your own computer with your favorite Python interpreter downloaded beforehand. Current R users may appreciate this open-source Python interpreter (here). If this sounds like something that you would be interested in, you are welcome to sign up using this link.