W e propose a comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty, district-level elections. This model, which provides a tool for comparative politics research analogous to that which regression analysis provides in the American two-party context, can be used to explain or predict how geographic distributions of electoral results depend upon economic conditions, neighborhood ethnic compos...

This paper analyzes the daily incidence of violence during the Second Intifada. We compare several alternative statistical models with different dynamic and structural stability characteristics while keeping modelling complexity to a minimum by only maintaining the assumption that the process under consideration is at most a second order discrete Markov process. For the pooled data, the best mo...

High dimensional structured data such as text and images is often poorly understood and misrepresented in statistical modeling. The standard histogram representation suffers from high variance and performs poorly in general. We explore novel connections between statistical translation, heat kernels on manifolds and graphs, and expected distances. These connections provide a new framework for un...

A vital task in sports video annotation is to detect and segment areas of the playfield. This is an important first step in player or ball tracking and detecting the location of the play on the playfield. In this paper we present a technique using statistical models, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) adaptation. This involves first creating a generic model of the pla...

We present several statistical models of syntactic constituent order for sentence realization. We compare several models, including simple joint models inspired by existing statistical parsing models, and several novel conditional models. The conditional models leverage a large set of linguistic features without manual feature selection. We apply and evaluate the models in sentence realization ...

What is tall? Like many words, tall is fundamentally compositional in meaning — whether an item is tall depends on the statistical properties of the set of items it is being compared to. Despite preliminary evidence to this effect, no mathematical models of how tall operates in a given context have ever been empirically evaluated. We compare a number of statistical models to adults and children...

This study presents a method to model population densities by using image texture statistics of semi-variance. In a case study of the City of Austin, Texas, we first selected sample census blocks of the same land use to build population models by land use. Regression analyses were conducted to infer the relationship between block population densities and image texture statistics of the semivari...