Justice and prisons policy

The field of justice policy is, of course, a critical one for state activity – indeed, arguably it is the most important field of activity, as the state exercises its ability to develop and enforce its rules, including by depriving individuals of their liberty. Notwithstanding this, scholarship in the field was, for many years, dominated by experts coming from different perspectives of legal studies, rather than political science. Nowadays, that has shifted somewhat, as interest in the activity of constitutional courts in political systems has grown, inspired, for instance, by the work of Martin Shapiro, Alec Stone Sweet, R. Daniel Kelemen and many others (e. g. Shapiro 1988; Shapiro and Stone 1994; Stone Sweet 2000; Shapiro and Stone Sweet 2002; Kelemen 2006).

Connectionist-based rules describing the pass-through of individual goods prices into trend inflation in the United States

This paper demonstrates a mechanism whereby rules can be extracted from a feedforward neural network trained to characterize the inflation "pass-through" problem in American monetary policy, defined as the relationship between changes in the growth rate(s) of individual commodities and the economy-wide rate of growth of consumer prices. Monthly price data are encoded and used to train a group of candidate connectionist architectures. One candidate is selected for rule extraction, using a custom decompositional extraction algorithm that generates rules in human-readable and machine-executable form. Rule and network accuracy are compared, and comments are made on the relationships expressed within the discovered rules. The types of discovered relationships could be used to guide monetary policy decisions.