non-reversible gerrymandering

Gregory Herschlag, Jonathan C. Mattingly [whom I met in Oaxaca and who acknowledges helpful conversations with Manon Michel while at CIRM two years ago], Matthias Sachs, and Evan Wyse just posted an arXiv paper using non-reversible MCMC methods to improve sampling of voting district plans towards fighting (partisan) Gerrymandering. In doing so we extend thecurrent framework for construction of non-reversible Markov chains on discrete samplingspaces by considering a generalization of skew detailed balance. Since this means sampling in a discrete space, the method using lifting. Meaning adding a dichotomous dummy variable, “based on a notion of flowing the center of mass of districts along a defined vector field”. The paper is quite detailed about the validation and the implementation of the method. With this interesting illustration for the mixing properties of the different versions: