Related papers: Truth-tracking via Approval Voting: Size Matters

In a typical optimization problem, the task is to pick one of a number of options with the lowest cost or the highest value. In practice, these cost/value quantities often come through processes such as measurement or machine learning,…

In this work we study the opinion formation in a voter-like model defined on a square lattice of linear size $L$. The agents may be in three different states, representing any public debate with three choices (yes, no, undecided). We…

Noise is an important factor that influences the reliability of information acquisition, transmission, processing, and storage. In order to suppress the inevitable noise effects, a fault-tolerant information processing approach via quantum…

An assembly of $n$ voters needs to decide on $t$ independent binary issues. Each voter has opinions about the issues, given by a $t$-bit vector. Anscombe's paradox shows that a policy following the majority opinion in each issue may not…

Off-policy evaluation methods are important in recommendation systems and search engines, where data collected under an existing logging policy is used to estimate the performance of a new proposed policy. A common approach to this problem…

We present a principled framework to address resource allocation for realizing boosting algorithms on substrates with communication or computation noise. Boosting classifiers (e.g., AdaBoost) make a final decision via a weighted vote from…

We investigate how robust approval-based multiwinner voting rules are to small perturbations in the votes. In particular, we consider the extent to which a committee can change after we add/remove/swap one approval, and we consider the…

Voting is the aggregation of individual preferences in order to select a winning alternative. Selection of a winner is accomplished via a voting rule, e.g., rank-order voting, majority rule, plurality rule, approval voting. Which voting…

Consider a real-valued function that can only be observed with stochastic noise at a finite set of design points within a Euclidean space. We wish to determine whether there exists a convex function that goes through the true function…

A voting rule decides on a probability distribution over a set of m alternatives, based on rankings of those alternatives provided by agents. We assume that agents have cardinal utility functions over the alternatives, but voting rules have…

We analyze the structure of the disagreement among a population of voters over a set of alternatives. Surveys typically ask either for pairwise comparisons, simple and intuitive for participants, or full rankings over alternatives,…

We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the Borda rule…

Classical work on metric space based committee selection problem interprets distance as ``near is better''. In this work, motivated by real-life situations, we interpret distance as ``far is better''. Formally stated, we initiate the study…

The process of gathering ground truth data through human annotation is a major bottleneck in the use of information extraction methods for populating the Semantic Web. Crowdsourcing-based approaches are gaining popularity in the attempt to…

The voter model consists of a set of agents whose opinion is a binary variable. At each time step, an agent along with a social neighbor is selected and the agent imitates the social neighbor at the next time step. In this paper, we study a…

Study samples often differ from the target populations of inference and policy decisions in non-random ways. Researchers typically believe that such departures from random sampling -- due to changes in the population over time and space, or…

Participatory budgeting, as a paradigm for democratic innovations, engages citizens in the distribution of a public budget to projects, which they propose and vote for implementation. So far, voting algorithms have been proposed and studied…

We consider the problem of learning the true ordering of a set of alternatives from largely incomplete and noisy rankings. We introduce a natural generalization of both the classical Mallows model of ranking distributions and the…

Majority-vote model is a much-studied model for social opinion dynamics of two competing opinions. With the recent appreciation that our social network comprises a variety of different layers forming a multiplex network, a natural question…

We suggest that one individual holds multiple degrees of belief about an outcome, given the evidence. We then investigate the implications of such noisy probabilities for a buyer and a seller of binary options and find the odds agreed upon…