Exploring Educational Equity: A Machine Learning Approach to Unravel Achievement Disparities in Georgia

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly exacerbated existing educational disparities in Georgia's K-12 system, particularly in terms of racial and ethnic achievement gaps. Utilizing machine learning methods, the study conducts a comprehensive analysis of student achievement rates across different demographics, regions, and subjects. The findings highlight a significant decline in proficiency in English and Math during the pandemic, with a noticeable contraction in score distribution and a greater impact on economically disadvantaged and Black students. Socio-economic status, as represented by the Directly Certified Percentage -- the percentage of students eligible for free lunch, emerges as the most crucial factor, with additional insights drawn from faculty resources such as teacher salaries and expenditure on instruction. The study also identifies disparities in achievement rates between urban and rural settings, as well as variations across counties, underscoring the influence of geographical and socio-economic factors. The data suggests that targeted interventions and resource allocation, particularly in schools with higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students, are essential for mitigating educational disparities.

Novelty Detection for Election Fraud: A Case Study with Agent-Based Simulation Data

In this paper, we propose a robust election simulation model and independently developed election anomaly detection algorithm that demonstrates the simulation's utility. The simulation generates artificial elections with similar properties and trends as elections from the real world, while giving users control and knowledge over all the important components of the elections. We generate a clean election results dataset without fraud as well as datasets with varying degrees of fraud. We then measure how well the algorithm is able to successfully detect the level of fraud present. The algorithm determines how similar actual election results are as compared to the predicted results from polling and a regression model of other regions that have similar demographics. We use k-means to partition electoral regions into clusters such that demographic homogeneity is maximized among clusters. We then use a novelty detection algorithm implemented as a one-class Support Vector Machine where the clean data is provided in the form of polling predictions and regression predictions. The regression predictions are built from the actual data in such a way that the data supervises itself. We show both the effectiveness of the simulation technique and the machine learning model in its success in identifying fraudulent regions.