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We show that the problem of political forecasting, i.e, predicting the result of elections and referendums, can be mapped to finding the ground state configuration of a classical spin system. Depending on the required prediction, this spin…
Estimating consumer preferences is central to many problems in economics and marketing. This paper develops a flexible framework for learning individual preferences from partial ranking information by interpreting observed rankings as…
Peer reviews, evaluations, and selections are a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals from those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection,…
This paper deals with randomized polling of a social network. In the case of forecasting the outcome of an election between two candidates A and B, classical intent polling asks randomly sampled individuals: who will you vote for?…
We consider the problem of optimal recovery of true ranking of $n$ items from a randomly chosen subset of their pairwise preferences. It is well known that without any further assumption, one requires a sample size of $\Omega(n^2)$ for the…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…
A canonical problem in social choice is how to aggregate ranked votes: given $n$ voters' rankings over $m$ candidates, what voting rule $f$ should we use to aggregate these votes into a single winner? One standard method for comparing…
We consider the problem of accurately recovering a matrix B of size M by M , which represents a probability distribution over M2 outcomes, given access to an observed matrix of "counts" generated by taking independent samples from the…
To aggregate rankings into a social ranking, one can use scoring systems such as Plurality, Veto, and Borda. We distinguish three types of methods: ranking by score, ranking by repeatedly choosing a winner that we delete and rank at the…
The Kemeny aggregation problem consists of computing the consensus rankings of an election with respect to the well-known Kemeny-Young voting method. These consensus rankings satisfy various fundamental properties and are the geometric…
In this paper, we consider lightweight decentralised algorithms for achieving consensus in distributed systems. Each member of a distributed group has a private value from a fixed set consisting of, say, two elements, and the goal is for…
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong average performance yet remain unreliable at the instance level, with frequent hallucinations, brittle failures, and poorly calibrated confidence. We study reliability through the lens of…
In-degree, PageRank, number of visits and other measures of Web page popularity significantly influence the ranking of search results by modern search engines. The assumption is that popularity is closely correlated with quality, a more…
We study a matrix completion problem where both the ground truth $R$ matrix and the unknown sampling distribution $P$ over observed entries are low-rank matrices, and \textit{share a common subspace}. We assume that a large amount $M$ of…
The interest in the wisdom of crowds stems mainly from the possibility of combining independent forecasts from experts in the hope that many expert minds are better than a few. Hence the relevant subject of study nowadays is the Vox…
Public opinion governance in social networks is critical for public health campaigns, political elections, and commercial marketing. In this paper, we addresse the problem of maximizing overall opinion in social networks by strategically…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
Analysis of short text, such as social media posts, is extremely difficult because of their inherent brevity. In addition to classifying topics of such posts, a common downstream task is grouping the authors of these documents for…
In the problem of aggregating experts' probabilistic predictions over an ordered set of outcomes, we introduce the axiom of level-strategy\-proofness (level-SP) and prove that it is a natural notion with several applications. Moreover, it…
The handling of probabilities in the form of uncertainty or partial information is an essential task for LLMs in many settings and applications. A common approach to evaluate an LLM's probabilistic reasoning capabilities is to assess its…