wru: Who Are You? Bayesian Predictions of Racial Category Using Surname and Geolocation

Abstract

This open-source software package enables researchers to predict individual ethnicity using his/her surname, geolocation, and other attributes such as gender and age. The method utilizes the Bayes’ rule to compute the posterior probability of each racial category for any given individual voter. The package implements methods described in Imai and Khanna (2015) “Improving Ecological Inference by Predicting Individual Ethnicity from Voter Registration Records.” Political Analysis, Forthcoming.

Source Code

The source code and the documentation are available for download from the GitHub repository as well as The Comprehensive R Archive Network.