Gaurab Pokharel

dblp:340/4219 · DBLP profile ↗
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1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2024
—ORCID · unresolved

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
1 paper
Computational social science and digital humanities · 100%
Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
1 paper
Data mining · 100%

Topics — the 2 heaviest of 2, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Computational social science and digital humanities
public administration
0.812024
Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning · AAAI 2024
Data mining › predictive modeling › classification
decision tree learning
0.812024
Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning · AAAI 2024

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

machine learning · 1.5decision tree · 1.5
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2024 Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning
abstract
Street-level bureaucrats interact directly with people on behalf of government agencies to perform a wide range of functions, including, for example, administering social services and policing. A key feature of street-level bureaucracy is that the civil servants, while tasked with implementing agency policy, are also granted significant discretion in how they choose to apply that policy in individual cases. Using that discretion could be beneficial, as it allows for exceptions to policies based on human interactions and evaluations, but it could also allow biases and inequities to seep into important domains of societal resource allocation. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to understand street-level bureaucrats' behavior. We leverage a rich dataset that combines demographic and other information on households with information on which homelessness interventions they were assigned during a period when assignments were not formulaic. We find that caseworker decisions in this time are highly predictable overall, and some, but not all of this predictivity can be captured by simple decision rules. We theorize that the decisions not captured by the simple decision rules can be considered applications of caseworker discretion. These discretionary decisions are far from random in both the characteristics of such households and in terms of the outcomes of the decisions. Caseworkers typically only apply discretion to households that would be considered less vulnerable. When they do apply discretion to assign households to more intensive interventions, the marginal benefits to those households are significantly higher than would be expected if the households were chosen at random; there is no similar reduction in marginal benefit to households that are discretionarily allocated less intensive interventions, suggesting that caseworkers are using their knowledge and experience to improve outcomes for households experiencing homelessness.
Gaurab Pokharel, Sanmay Das, Patrick J. Fowler
AAAI1