Ecological Regression with Partial Identification

Understand

Ecological inference (EI) is the process of learning about individual behavior from aggregate data.

• We study a partially identified linear contextual effects model for EI and describe how to estimate the district level parameter averaging over many precincts in the presence of the non-identified parameter of the contextual effect.
• This may be regarded as a first attempt in this venerable literature to limit the scope of the key form of non-identifiability in EI.
• To study the operating characteristics of our model, we have amassed the largest collection of data with known ground truth ever applied to evaluate solutions to the EI problem.