NYU researchers devise method to identify ‘311’ underreporting of heat and hot water shortages
Complaint lines such as New York City’s 311 let people report quality-of-life problems in their building or neighborhood, from excessive noise to illegal parking. But resident-generated data typically suffer from reporting bias, with some neighborhoods and addresses calling attention to problems at lower rates than others.
A team of New York University researchers has developed an automated modeling tool to help the New York City government estimate 311 under-reporting by building, neighborhood, and subpopulation. In a new study, published today [May 30] in Annals of Applied Statistics, the researchers describe a method that, using machine learning, can estimate the potential ...