Amy Wilson | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Open Source Software and Data for Human Service Development: A Case Study on Predicting Housing Instability

Open-source data and tools are lauded as essential for replicable and usable social science, though little is known about their use in resource constrained human service provision. This paper examines the challenges and opportunities of open-source tools and data in human service development by using both to forecast failure to pay eviction filings in Bronx County, NY. We use zip code level data from the Housing Data Coalition, the American Community Survey 5-year estimates, and DeepMaps Model of the Labor Force to forecast rates through July 2021. We employ multilevel (MLM) and exponential smoothing (ETS) models using the R project for Statistical Computing, an oft used open-source statistical software. We compare our results to what happened during the same period, to illustrate the efficacy of the open-source tools and techniques employed. We argue open-source data and software may facilitate rapid analysis of public data - a much-needed ability in human service intervention development under increasingly constrained resources - but find public data are limited by the information they reliably capture, limiting their utility by a non-trivial margin of error. The manuscript concludes by considering lessons for human service organizations with limited analytical resources and a vested interest in low-resourced communities.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2019

The integration of variable generation and storage into electricity capacity markets

We show how to value both variable generation and energy storage to enable them to be integrated fairly and optimally into electricity capacity markets. We develop theory based on balancing expected energy unserved against costs of capacity procurement, and in which the optimal procurement is that necessary to meet an appropriate reliability standard. For conventional generation the theory reduces to that already in common use. Further the valuation of both variable generation and storage coincides with the traditional risk-based approach based on equivalent firm capacity. The determination of the equivalent firm capacity of storage requires particular care; this is due both to the flexibility with which storage added to an existing system may be scheduled, and also because, when any resource is added to an existing system, storage already within that system may be flexibly rescheduled. We illustrate the theory with an example based on the GB system.

math.OC↗