Political Data Science

New paper for 2016 #AAAI Spring Symposium in #Stanford Our article  for #AAAI spring symposium in #Stanford has just been published:                                                 Thieltges, Andree, Schmidt, Florian, and Hegelich, Simon,2016, The Devil‘s Triangle: Ethical considerations on developing bot detectionmethods, in: AAAI, 2016 Spring Symposium, Technical Report, SS-16-01, 277-281. Abstract: Social media is increasingly populated with bots. To protect the authenticity of the user-experience machine learning algorithms are used to detect these bots. Ethical dimensions of these methods have not been thoroughly considered, yet. Taking histogram analysis of Twitter users' profile images as example, the paper demonstrates the trade-offs of accuracy, transparency, and robustness. Because there is no general optimum in ethical considerations, these dimensions form a "devil's triangle".

New paper in #SPSR „The Gas Game: Simulating Decision-Making in the EU’s External Natural Gas Policy”                                          Martina Grabau and I just published an article in Swiss Political Science Review (SPSR). Grabau, M. and Hegelich, S. (2016), The Gas Game: Simulating Decision-Making in the European Union's External Natural Gas Policy. Swiss Political Science Review. doi: 10.1111/spsr.12202 We used the "Predictioneer's Game" to simulate the EU's gas policy. Unfortunately, the codes of this simulation are not public. Therefore, we created our own model: We used fuzzing, machine learning and simple heuristics to create a model that performance as good as the predictioneer's game but we publish the codes of course: # Code to create initial test set that is suitable formated for PG # # # dfNew <- data.frame() # for(i in 1:200){ # df$Player<- c("S1", "S2","S3", "S4","