Related papers: In elections, irrelevant alternatives provide rele…
A voting system should not merely report the outcome: it should also provide sufficient evidence to convince reasonable observers that the reported outcome is correct. Many deployed systems, notably paperless DRE machines still in use in US…
Graduation and dropout rates have always been a serious consideration for educational institutions and students. High dropout rates negatively impact both the lives of individual students and institutions. To address this problem, this…
We view voting rules as classifiers that assign a winner (a class) to a profile of voters' preferences (an instance). We propose to apply techniques from formal explainability, most notably abductive and contrastive explanations, to…
Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model…
Disaggregated evaluations of AI systems, in which system performance is assessed and reported separately for different groups of people, are conceptually simple. However, their design involves a variety of choices. Some of these choices…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
Abstaining classifiers have the option to abstain from making predictions on inputs that they are unsure about. These classifiers are becoming increasingly popular in high-stakes decision-making problems, as they can withhold uncertain…
A primary challenge in collective decision-making is that achieving unanimous agreement is difficult, even at the level of criteria. The history of social choice theory illustrates this: numerous normative criteria on voting rules have been…
This work explores the effects of relevant and irrelevant boolean variables on the accuracy of classifiers. The analysis uses the assumption that the variables are conditionally independent given the class, and focuses on a natural family…
Which level of voting costs is optimal in a democracy? This paper argues that intermediate voting costs - what we term a "Midcost democracy" - should be avoided, as they fail to ensure that electoral outcomes reflect the preferences of the…
Motivated by the difficulty of specifying complete ordinal preferences over a large set of $m$ candidates, we study voting rules that are computable by querying voters about $t < m$ candidates. Generalizing prior works that focused on…
Dropout is one of the key techniques to prevent the learning from overfitting. It is explained that dropout works as a kind of modified L2 regularization. Here, we shed light on the dropout from Bayesian standpoint. Bayesian interpretation…
Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…
When each voter rates or ranks several candidates for a single office, a strong Condorcet winner (SCW) is one who beats all others in two-way races. Among 21 electoral systems examined, 18 will sometimes make candidate X the winner even if…
When selecting multiple candidates based on approval preferences of agents, the proportional representation of agents' opinions is an important and well-studied desideratum. Existing criteria for evaluating the representativeness of…
This study presents a theoretical analysis on the efficiency of interleaving, an efficient online evaluation method for rankings. Although interleaving has already been applied to production systems, the source of its high efficiency has…
We study the independent approval model (IAM) for approval elections, where each candidate has its own approval probability and is approved independently of the other ones. This model generalizes, e.g., the impartial culture, the Hamming…
Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…
Various risk-limiting audit (RLA) methods have been developed for instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections. A recent method, AWAIRE, is the first efficient approach that can take advantage of but does not require cast vote records (CVRs).…
Dropout has been demonstrated as a simple and effective module to not only regularize the training process of deep neural networks, but also provide the uncertainty estimation for prediction. However, the quality of uncertainty estimation…