Part 0. Executive Summary How do you win an election in a political district that you have previously lost? How do you target voters and precincts to switch to your side for an upcoming election? Where do you focus your limited resources to provide the best chance of winning? These…

Executive Summary — There have been many attempts to predict the possibility of child abuse or the success of child/parent matching using biological parent data and other commonly available data. Termed predictive analytics, these methods have led to some success in certain states but have scared others regarding the infringement of civil and…

Utilizing Graph Convolutional Networks to Detect and Predict Voting Patterns Part 0. Executive Summary Mathematical models serve as a means to understand voting results in past elections as well as to try and predict the results of future elections. …

Part 1. Background “All crimes are local.” Whether you agree with this statement or not, there are many different methods to model historical crime and to try and predict future crime. These methods range from statistical methods to system dynamics methods to geographical methods. …

Part 1. Background There have been many attempts to model the geographic distribution of crime and which environmental and social factors affect crime levels. These models range from statistical models to system dynamics models to geographic models. Space-time clusters were used by Bowers and Johnson (Ref. 1) to draw some…

Part 1. Background How often have you heard a friend or acquaintance say, “I beat the market last year by 25%”? Or maybe, “I have the BEST mutual fund manager. He/she beat the market last year by 30%” Do you ever wonder how true these statements are and/or if these…

Part 1. Background In the last ten years or so there has been a growing movement for the decarceration of non-violent prisoners in order to reduce overcrowding of the prisons. Part of this movement was due to lawsuits brought about to reduce overcrowding and part was due to a rethink…

Part 1. Background I read Sayar Banerjee’s recent article on the statistical basis at the heart of the book and movie Moneyball as well as the entire baseball sabermetrics movement (Ref. 1). The main point of moneyball (i.e., baseball sabermetrics) is to determine ways to win Major League Baseball (MLB)…

Part 1. Background I previously had written about applying neural networks to predicting the outcomes of National Football League (NFL) games. After some trial and error and learning, I managed to derive neural networks that could quickly be trained and could predict the outcomes of greater than 75% of the…