The Department of Mathematics & Statistics would like to welcome:
Dr. David Holleran, Associate Professor, Dept. of Criminology, on Thursday, February 14th at 11:30 am in SCP 229.
Title: An Application of Random Forests to Understand Minority Juvenile Confinement in New Jersey
Abstract: The over representation of minority youth within the juvenile justice system has been a well -documented issue for decades. This study uses data from the New Jersey Family Court in 2010 to examine the factors, with specific attention being paid to the race of the juvenile, that contribute to a juvenile being committed to state incarceration. While minority youth comprise the bulk of the juvenile correctional population in New Jersey, the New Jersey Family Court rarely incarcerated juveniles in 2010 resulting in data imbalance. A variety of procedures have been offered in statistical literature to deal with imbalanced data. In this study, the role of the race of the juvenile in the confinement decision is explored via a comparison of results obtained from additive binary logistic regression models to results obtained from balanced random forests.
Dr. David Holleran is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at The College of New Jersey. He holds a Ph.D. in Criminology from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His research interests include the intersection of race and various criminal justice decision points and, more recently, policy analysis and the geospatial distribution of crime and police services. He is serving as the faculty supervisor to the Jeffrey R. Ralston Foundation Crime Analytics Fellowship program.