Publications by Type: Software

2021
UnbiasedPrivacy
Georgina Evans, Gary King, Margaret Schwenzfeier, and Abhradeep Thakurta. 2021. “UnbiasedPrivacy”.
2020
OpenDP: Developing Open Source Tools for Differential Privacy
Gary King and Salil Vadhan. 2020. “OpenDP: Developing Open Source Tools for Differential Privacy”.
PrivacyUnbiased
Georgina Evans and Gary King. 2020. “PrivacyUnbiased”.
2020. “QuickCode”.
2018
Marco Gaboardi, James Honaker, Gary King, Kobbi Nissim, Jonathan Ullman, and Salil Vadhan. 2018. “PSI (Ψ): a Private Data Sharing Interface”. psi.png
Compactness: An R Package for Measuring Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See It
Aaron Kaufman, Gary King, and Mayya Komisarchik. 2018. “Compactness: An R Package for Measuring Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See It”.Abstract

This software implements the method described in Aaron Kaufman, Gary King, and Mayya Komisarchik. Forthcoming. “How to Measure Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See It.” American Journal of Political Science. Copy at http://j.mp/2u9OWrG 

Our paper abstract:  To deter gerrymandering, many state constitutions require legislative districts to be "compact." Yet, the law offers few precise definitions other than "you know it when you see it," which effectively implies a common understanding of the concept. In contrast, academics have shown that compactness has multiple dimensions and have generated many conflicting measures. We hypothesize that both are correct -- that compactness is complex and multidimensional, but a common understanding exists across people. We develop a survey to elicit this understanding, with high reliability (in data where the standard paired comparisons approach fails). We create a statistical model that predicts, with high accuracy, solely from the geometric features of the district, compactness evaluations by judges and public officials responsible for redistricting, among others. We also offer compactness data from our validated measure for 20,160 state legislative and congressional districts, as well as software to compute this measure from any district.
 

 

Readme2: An R Package for Improved Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science
Connor T. Jerzak, Gary King, and Anton Strezhnev. 2018. “Readme2: An R Package for Improved Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science”.Abstract

An R package for estimating category proportions in an unlabeled set of documents given a labeled set, by implementing the method described in Jerzak, King, and Strezhnev (2019). This method is meant to improve on the ideas in Hopkins and King (2010), which introduced a quantification algorithm to estimate category proportions without directly classifying individual observations. This version of the software refines the original method by implementing a technique for selecitng optimal textual features in order to minimize the error of the estimated category proportions. Automatic differentiation, stochastic gradient descent, and batch re-normalization are used to carry out the optimization. Other pre-processing functions are available, as well as an interface to the earlier version of the algorithm for comparison. The package also provides users with the ability to extract the generated features for use in other tasks.

(Here's the abstract from our paper: Computer scientists and statisticians are often interested in classifying textual documents into chosen categories. Social scientists and others are often less interested in any one document and instead try to estimate the proportion falling in each category. The two existing types of techniques for estimating these category proportions are parametric "classify and count" methods and "direct" nonparametric estimation of category proportions without an individual classification step. Unfortunately, classify and count methods can sometimes be highly model dependent or generate more bias in the proportions even as the percent correctly classified increases. Direct estimation avoids these problems, but can suffer when the meaning and usage of language is too similar across categories or too different between training and test sets. We develop an improved direct estimation approach without these problems by introducing continuously valued text features optimized for this problem, along with a form of matching adapted from the causal inference literature. We evaluate our approach in analyses of a diverse collection of 73 data sets, showing that it substantially improves performance compared to existing approaches. As a companion to this paper, we offer easy-to-use software that implements all ideas discussed herein.)

2017
booc.io: Software for an Education System with Hierarchical Concept Maps
Michail Schwab, Hendrik Strobelt, James Tompkin, Colin Fredericks, Connor Huff, Dana Higgins, Anton Strezhnev, Mayya Komisarchik, Gary King, and Hanspeter Pfister. 2017. “booc.io: Software for an Education System with Hierarchical Concept Maps”.
2015
Gary King. 2015. “Perusall”.
RobustSE
Gary King and Margaret Roberts. 2015. “RobustSE”.Abstract

The RobustSE package implements the generalized information matrix (GIM) test to detect model misspecification described by King & Roberts (2015).

When a researcher suspects a model may be misspecified, rather than attempting to correct by fitting robust standard errors, the GIM test should be utilized as a formal statistical test for model misspecification. If the GIM test rejects the null hypothesis, the researcher should re-specify the model, as it is possible estimators of the misspecified model will be biased.

2014
MatchingFrontier: R Package for Calculating the Balance-Sample Size Frontier
Gary King, Christopher Lucas, and Richard Nielsen. 2014. “MatchingFrontier: R Package for Calculating the Balance-Sample Size Frontier”.Abstract

MatchingFrontier is an easy-to-use R Package for making optimal causal inferences from observational data.  Despite their popularity, existing matching approaches leave researchers with two fundamental tensions. First, they are designed to maximize one metric (such as propensity score or Mahalanobis distance) but are judged against another for which they were not designed (such as L1 or differences in means). Second, they lack a principled solution to revealing the implicit bias-variance trade off: matching methods need to optimize with respect to both imbalance (between the treated and control groups) and the number of observations pruned, but existing approaches optimize with respect to only one; users then either ignore the other, or tweak it, usually suboptimally, by hand.

MatchingFrontier resolves both tensions by consolidating previous techniques into a single, optimal, and flexible approach. It calculates the matching solution with maximum balance for each possible sample size (N, N-1, N-2,...). It thus directly calculates the entire balance-sample size frontier, from which the user can easily choose one, several, or all subsamples from which to conduct their final analysis, given their own choice of imbalance metric and quantity of interest. MatchingFrontier solves the joint optimization problem in one run, automatically, without manual tweaking, and without iteration.  Although for each subset size k, there exist a huge (N choose k) number of unique subsets, MatchingFrontier includes specially designed fast algorithms that give the optimal answer, usually in a few minutes.  

MatchingFrontier implements the methods in this paper:  

King, Gary, Christopher Lucas, and Richard Nielsen. 2014. The Balance-Sample Size Frontier in Matching Methods for Causal Inference, copy at http://j.mp/1dRDMrE
 

See http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/frontier/

2011
AutoCast: Automated Bayesian Forecasting with YourCast
Jonathan Bischof, Gary King, and Samir Soneji. 2011. “AutoCast: Automated Bayesian Forecasting with YourCast”.
2010
JudgeIt II: A Program for Evaluating Electoral Systems and Redistricting Plans
Andrew Gelman, Gary King, and Andrew Thomas. 2010. “JudgeIt II: A Program for Evaluating Electoral Systems and Redistricting Plans”.Abstract

A program for analyzing most any feature of district-level legislative elections data, including prediction, evaluating redistricting plans, estimating counterfactual hypotheses (such as what would happen if a term-limitation amendment were imposed). This implements statistical procedures described in a series of journal articles and has been used during redistricting in many states by judges, partisans, governments, private citizens, and many others. The earlier version was winner of the APSA Research Software Award.

Track JudgeIt Changes

ReadMe: Software for Automated Content Analysis
Gary King, Matthew Knowles, and Steven Melendez. 2010. “ReadMe: Software for Automated Content Analysis”.Abstract
This program will read and analyze a large set of text documents and report on the proportion of documents in each of a set of given categories.
2009
AMELIA II: A Program for Missing Data
James Honaker, Gary King, and Matthew Blackwell. 2009. “AMELIA II: A Program for Missing Data”.Abstract
This program multiply imputes missing data in cross-sectional, time series, and time series cross-sectional data sets. It includes a Windows version (no knowledge of R required), and a version that works with R either from the command line or via a GUI.
CEM: Coarsened Exact Matching Software
Stefano Iacus, Gary King, and Giuseppe Porro. 2009. “CEM: Coarsened Exact Matching Software”.
Gary King. 2009. “OpenScholar”.
2008
VA: Verbal Autopsies
Gary King and Ying Lu. 2008. “VA: Verbal Autopsies”.
2007
Gary King. 2007. “Dataverse: Open Source Research Data Repository Software”. dvn.png
Anchors: Software for Anchoring Vignettes Data
Jonathan Wand, Gary King, and Olivia Lau. 2007. “Anchors: Software for Anchoring Vignettes Data”.

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