Related papers: Sampling-Based Winner Prediction in District-Based…

We study computational aspects of three prominent voting rules that use approval ballots to elect multiple winners. These rules are satisfaction approval voting, proportional approval voting, and reweighted approval voting. We first show…

In statistics and machine learning, logistic regression is a widely-used supervised learning technique primarily employed for binary classification tasks. When the number of observations greatly exceeds the number of predictor variables, we…

Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…

Design of experiments, random search, initialization of population-based methods, or sampling inside an epoch of an evolutionary algorithm use a sample drawn according to some probability distribution for approximating the location of an…

Local decision rules are commonly understood to be more explainable, due to the local nature of the patterns involved. With numerical optimization methods such as gradient boosting, ensembles of local decision rules can gain good predictive…

Sampling from very large spatial populations is challenging. The solutions suggested in recent literature on this subject often require that the randomly selected units are well distributed across the study region by using complex…

In representative democracy, a redistricting map is chosen to partition an electorate into districts which each elects a representative. A valid redistricting map must satisfy a collection of constraints such as being compact, contiguous,…

Deciding whether a political districting plan was distorted by a hidden agenda, or whether it dilutes the voting power of some group, requires a neutral baseline for comparison. Remarkably, all nine U.S. Supreme Court justices have now…

Usually a voting rule requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial…

We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…

Local search is a fundamental method in operations research and combinatorial optimisation. It has been widely applied to a variety of challenging problems, including multi-objective optimisation where multiple, often conflicting,…

The voting method, an ensemble approach for fundamental frequency estimation, is empirically known for its robustness but lacks thorough investigation. This paper provides a principled analysis and improvement of this technique. First, we…

We study the complexity of influencing elections through bribery: How computationally complex is it for an external actor to determine whether by a certain amount of bribing voters a specified candidate can be made the election's winner? We…

In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…

We consider a population, partitioned into a set of communities, and study the problem of identifying the largest community within the population via sequential, random sampling of individuals. There are multiple sampling domains, referred…

Electing a leader is a classical problem in distributed computing system. Synchronization between processes often requires one process acting as a coordinator. If an elected leader node fails, the other nodes of the system need to elect…

We study the complexity of determining a winning committee under the Chamberlin--Courant voting rule when voters' preferences are single-crossing on a line, or, more generally, on a median graph (this class of graphs includes, e.g., trees…

The Schulze voting method aggregates voter preference data using maxmin-weight graph paths, achieving the Condorcet property that a candidate who would win every head-to-head contest will also win the overall election. Once the voter…

We consider a random interval splitting process, in which the splitting rule depends on the empirical distribution of interval lengths. We show that this empirical distribution converges to a limit almost surely as the number of intervals…

We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…