The Impact of Socioeconomic Factors on Health Disparities

High-quality healthcare in the US can be cost-prohibitive for certain socioeconomic groups. In this paper, we examined data from the US Census and the CDC to determine the degree to which specific socioeconomic factors correlate with both specific and general health metrics. We employed visual analysis to find broad trends and predictive modeling to identify more complex relationships between variables. Our results indicate that certain socioeconomic factors, like income and educational attainment, are highly correlated with aggregate measures of health.

Spectral Clustering Revisited: Information Hidden in the Fiedler Vector

We are interested in the clustering problem on graphs: it is known that if there are two underlying clusters, then the signs of the eigenvector corresponding to the second largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix can reliably reconstruct the two clusters. We argue that the vertices for which the eigenvector has the largest and the smallest entries, respectively, are unusually strongly connected to their own cluster and more reliably classified than the rest. This can be regarded as a discrete version of the Hot Spots conjecture and should be useful in applications. We give a rigorous proof for the stochastic block model and several examples.