Elisabeth Paulson (Workshop in Applied Statistics)

This Week's Speaker

Elisabeth Paulson, "Improving Refugee Resettlement Outcomes with Optimization"

Abstract

Every year, tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers are resettled in host countries across the world. In many host countries, newcomers are assigned to a specific locality (e.g., city) upon arrival by a resettlement agency. This assignment decision has a profound long-term impact on integration outcomes. The high-level goal of this line of work is to improve these outcomes through prediction and optimization algorithms.

We will describe two new dynamic assignment algorithms to dynamically match refugees and asylum seekers to geographic localities within a host country. The first---currently implemented in a multi-year pilot in Switzerland---achieves near-optimal expected employment (and improves upon the status quo procedure by about 40%). However, it can result in an imbalanced allocation to the localities over time, which creates undesirable workload inefficiencies for resettlement agencies. To address this problem, the second algorithm—currently being deployed in the US—balances the goal of improving outcomes with the desire for a balanced allocation over time. We will also discuss extensions of these methods that improve predictive performance in the face of non-stationarity, and enhance robustness and fairness across demographic groups

The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers.

More information is available at the Gov 3009 website: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009

All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.