Math and Stat Colloquium

• April 13, 2023
• 4:00 PM - 5:00 CST
• IES 110
• Tuyen Tran, ttran18@luc.edu
• Open to the public.
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• Details

  Speaker: Rrita Zejnullahi
  Title: Fund allocation for poverty alleviation
  
  Abstract: In this talk, we consider the problem of how to optimally allocate a finite amount of resources across different locations/populations. While this decision task has wide application (e.g., allocation of health care funds to different populations, allocation of vaccines to different locations), we focus on the problem of reducing national poverty via sub-national cash transfers. Though an optimal strategy has long been identified in this situation, understanding the impact of estimation uncertainty of the needs of different groups/locations on the vector of allocations, and incorporating these into the optimal targeting procedure has not yet been formally addressed. Through simulations, we illustrate the consequences of ignoring estimation uncertainty on the vector of allocations. We then identify a strategy that formally accounts for this error.
  ·       This presentation will cover work in progress.
  
  Biography: Rrita Zejnullahi is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, working on the development of a decision-making framework for policy decisions based on predictions from statistical models. Previously, she obtained a PhD in Statistics from Northwestern University, where she focused on small-sample methods for meta-analysis, with applications to education, medicine and the social sciences.
  
  https://stat.uw.edu/about-us/people/rrita-zejnullahi