Award Abstract #1106999
Combinatorial Statistics and Quantitative Social Choice

NSF Org:	DMS Division of Mathematical Sciences
Initial Amendment Date:	September 1, 2011
Latest Amendment Date:	August 6, 2013
Award Number:	1106999
Award Instrument:	Continuing grant
Program Manager:	Tomek Bartoszynski DMS Division of Mathematical Sciences MPS Directorate for Mathematical & Physical Sciences
Start Date:	September 15, 2011
Expires:	August 31, 2015 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$329,804.00
Investigator(s):	Elchanan Mossel mossel@stat.berkeley.edu (Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	University of California-Berkeley Sponsored Projects Office BERKELEY, CA 94704-5940 (510)642-8109
NSF Program(s):	PROBABILITY, COFFES
Program Reference Code(s):
Program Element Code(s):	1263, 7552

ABSTRACT

The investigator studies combinatorial, probabilistic and analytic concepts, theorems and algorithms for analyzing stochastic models coming from social choice theory, from the theory of biological networks and from theoretical computer science.

The proposal aims to provide rigorous models answering questions from molecular biology, from the theory of voting and from theoretical computer science. Some of the biologically motivated problems we study include: Which biological networks can be reconstructed from genetic data? How can they be efficiently reconstructed?

What genealogical relations between individuals can be recovered from their genomes in an efficient manner? In the theory of voting the questions we address focus on minimizing the ability to manipulate voting and ranking methods and to increase their robustness against voting errors.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

Elchanan Mossel and Miklos Racz. "Election Manipulation - the average case," ACM SIGecom Exchanges, v.11, 2012.

Mossel, Elchanan; Oleszkiewicz, Krzysztof; Sen, Arnab. "On Reverse Hypercontractivity," GEOMETRIC AND FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS, v.23, 2013, p. 1062-1097.

Hammond, Alan; Mossel, Elchanan; Pete, Gabor. "Exit time tails from pairwise decorrelation in hidden Markov chains, with applications to dynamical percolation," ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF PROBABILITY, v.17, 2012, p. 1-16.

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