Legislative prediction via random walks over a heterogeneous graph

Abstract

In this article, we propose a random walk-based model to predict legislators' votes on a set of bills. In particular, we first convert roll call data, i.e. the recorded votes and the corresponding deliberative bodies, to a heterogeneous graph, where both the legislators and bills are treated as vertices. Three types of weighted edges are then computed accordingly, representing legislators' social and political relations, bills' semantic similarity, and legislator-bill vote relations. Through performing two-stage random walks over this heterogeneous graph, we can estimate legislative votes on past and future bills. We apply this proposed method on real legislative roll call data of the United States Congress and compare to state-of-the-art approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance and unique prediction power of the proposed model. Copyright © 2012 by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.