{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/bisg-when-inferring-race-or-ethnicity-does-it","title":"A calibrated BISG for inferring race from surname and geolocation","arxiv_id":"2304.09126","date":"2023-04-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Philip Greengard","Andrew Gelman"],"abstract":"Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) is a ubiquitous tool for predicting race and ethnicity using an individual's geolocation and surname. Here we demonstrate that statistical dependence of surname and geolocation within racial/ethnic categories in the United States results in biases for minority subpopulations, and we introduce a raking-based improvement. Our method augments the data used by BISG--distributions of race by geolocation and race by surname--with the distribution of surname by geolocation obtained from state voter files. We validate our algorithm on state voter registration lists that contain self-identified race/ethnicity.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.09126v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.09126v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"bisg-when-inferring-race-or-ethnicity-does-it","repo_url":"https://github.com/pgree/raking_bisg","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}