arXiv subjects

Noah Dasanaike

Publications and source records attributed to Noah Dasanaike.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Probabilistic Race and Ethnicity Prediction Using Group-Specific Name Lists

Statistically valid estimation of racial and ethnic disparities often requires inferring the probability that an individual belongs to a particular racial or ethnic group given only their name and geographic location. The standard approach, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG), relies on group population frequencies for each name. Although the U.S. Census Bureau provides such information for common names and a limited set of racial categories, comparable data do not exist for many racial and ethnic groups and are rarely available outside the U.S. We propose the list-powered BISG ($\ell$BISG) method, which can be used to derive calibrated group probabilities from group-specific name lists. These lists may be compiled based on expert knowledge or generated synthetically using large language models (LLMs), and thus may be subject to unknown biases. Representing names as embeddings, we treat list membership as a proxy prediction task and apply a correction based on proximal inference to recover the target group probabilities. We validate the method on U.S. voter files with self-reported race, on the full-count 1900 U.S. Census, and on the Lebanese voter registry. We find that LLM-generated name lists yield accurate and well-calibrated probabilities as well as precise disparity estimates comparable to those obtained using methods that require name-race data. Thus, $\ell$BISG substantially broadens the applicability of probabilistic race and ethnicity prediction to settings where name-race data are unavailable.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Using Embedding Models to Improve Probabilistic Race Prediction

Estimating racial disparity requires individual-level race data, which are often unavailable due to the sensitivity of collecting such information. To address this problem, many researchers utilize Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG), which have critically relied on Census surname data. Unfortunately, these data capture race-surname relationships only for common surnames, omitting approximately 10% of the US population. We show that predictive performance degrades substantially for individuals with such omitted, uncommon surnames because standard BISG implementation relies on a uninformative generic prior in these cases. To address this limitation, we propose embedding-powered BISG (eBISG), which uses pre-trained text embeddings to represent names as dense vectors and trains neural networks on 2020 Census surname and first-name data to estimate race probabilities for names not covered in the Census. We compare five approaches: standard BISG using only surnames, BIFSG incorporating first name probabilities, surname embedding for unlisted names, surname and first name embedding combining both, and a full-name embedding trained on voter file data from Southern states that captures interactions between name components. We show that each successive eBISG approach improves race prediction, with the full-name embedding yielding the largest gains, particularly for Hispanic and Asian voters whose surnames are absent from the Census list.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

EnsembleLink: Accurate Record Linkage Without Training Data

Record linkage, the process of matching records that refer to the same entity across datasets, is essential to empirical social science but remains methodologically underdeveloped. Researchers treat it as a preprocessing step, applying ad hoc rules without quantifying the uncertainty that linkage errors introduce into downstream analyses. Existing methods either achieve low accuracy or require substantial labeled training data. I present EnsembleLink, a method that achieves high accuracy without any training labels. EnsembleLink leverages pre-trained language models that have learned semantic relationships (e.g., that "South Ozone Park" is a neighborhood in "New York City" or that "Lutte ouvriere" refers to the Trotskyist "Workers' Struggle" party) from large text corpora. On benchmarks spanning city names, person names, organizations, multilingual political parties, and bibliographic records, EnsembleLink matches or exceeds methods requiring extensive labeling. The method runs locally on open-source models, requiring no external API calls, and completes typical linkage tasks in minutes.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Large Language Models Naively Recover Ethnicity from Individual Records

I demonstrate that large language models can infer ethnicity from names with accuracy exceeding that of Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) without additional training data, enabling inference outside the United States and to contextually appropriate classification categories. Using stratified samples from Florida and North Carolina voter files with self-reported race, LLM-based classification achieves up to 84.7% accuracy, outperforming BISG (68.2%) on balanced samples. I test six models including Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-4o, and open-source alternatives such as DeepSeek v3.2 and GLM-4.7. Enabling extended reasoning can improve accuracy by 1-3 percentage points, though effects vary across contexts; including metadata such as party registration reaches 86.7%. LLM classification also reduces the income bias inherent in BISG, where minorities in wealthier neighborhoods are systematically misclassified as White. I further validate using Lebanese voter registration with religious sect (64.3% accuracy), Indian MPs from reserved constituencies (99.2%), and Indian land records with caste classification (74.0%). Aggregate validation across India, Uganda, Nepal, Armenia, Chile, and Costa Rica using original full-count voter rolls demonstrates that the method recovers known population distributions where naming conventions are distinctive. For large-scale applications, small transformer models fine-tuned on LLM labels exceed BISG accuracy while enabling local deployment at no cost.

cs.CL↗