Applied Statistics - Richard Berk 

 This week, the Applied Statistics Workshop will present a talk by Richard Berk, professor of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania.  Professor Berk received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and served on the faculties of Northwestern, UC-Santa Barbara and UCLA before moving to Penn in 2006.  He has published widely in journals in statistics and criminology.  His research focuses on the application of statistical methods to questions arising in the criminal justice system.  One of his current projects is the development and application of statistical learning procedures to anticipate failures on probation or parole and to forecast crime “hot spots” a week in advance. 

 Professor Berk will present a talk entitled "Counting the Homeless in Los Angeles County," which is based on joint work with Brian Kriegler and Donald Ylvisaker. Their paper is available through the workshop  website . The presentation will be at noon on Wednesday, April 2 in Room N354, CGIS North, 1737 Cambridge St. As always, lunch will be provided. An abstract of the paper follows on the jump: 


 
Counting the Homeless in Los Angeles County

 Richard Berk 
Department Statistics 
Department of Criminology 
University of Pennsylvania 

 ABSTRACT 

 Over the past two decades, a variety of methods have been used to count the homeless in large metropolitan areas. In this paper, we report on a recent effort to count the homeless in Los Angeles County. A number of complications are discussed including the need to impute homeless counts to areas of the County not sampled and to take the relative costs of underestimates and overestimates of the number of homeless individuals into account. We conclude that despite their imperfections, the estimated counts provided useful and credible information to the stakeholders involved. Of course, not all stakeholders agreed. 

 Joint work with Brian Kriegler and Donald Ylvisaker.