The recent technological advancements have led to the availability of a plethora of heterogenous datasets, e.g., images tagged with geo-location and descriptive keywords. An object in these datasets is described by a set of high-dimensional feature vectors. For example, a keyword-tagged image is represented by a color-histogram and a…

This dissertation addresses two research questions: 1. Do states misrepresent their progress on their own state assessments? 2. If states do distort their progress, are their predictors to suggest why this distortion occurs? The first research question requires that distortion be defined. For the purposes of this dissertation I calculated the…