Consensus theories: an oriented survey

This article surveys seven directions of consensus theories: Arrowian results, federation consensus rules, metric consensus rules, tournament solutions, restricted domains, abstract consensus theories, algorithmic and complexity issues. This survey is oriented in the sense that it is mainly – but not exclusively – concentrated on the most significant results obtained, sometimes with other searchers, by a team of French searchers who are or were full or associate members of the Centre d'Analyse et de Mathématique Sociale (CAMS).Consensus theories ; Arrowian results ; aggregation rules ; metric consensus rules ; median ; tournament solutions ; restricted domains ; lower valuations ; median semilattice ; complexity

A graph interpretation of the least squares ranking method

The paper aims at analyzing the least squares ranking method for generalized tournaments with possible missing and multiple paired comparisons. The bilateral relationships may reflect the outcomes of a sport competition, product comparisons, or evaluation of political candidates and policies. It is shown that the rating vector can be obtained as a limit point of an iterative process based on the scores in almost all cases. The calculation is interpreted on an undirected graph with loops attached to some nodes, revealing that the procedure takes into account not only the given object's results but also the strength of objects compared with it. We explore the connection between this method and another procedure defined for ranking the nodes in a digraph, the positional power measure. The decomposition of the least squares solution offers a number of ways to modify the method

Consensus theories: an oriented survey

URL des Documents de travail : http://ces.univ-paris1.fr/cesdp/cesdp2010.htmlDocuments de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 2010.57 - ISSN : 1955-611XThis article surveys seven directions of consensus theories: Arrowian results, federation consensus rules, metric consensus rules, tournament solutions, restricted domains, abstract consensus theories, algorithmic and complexity issues. This survey is oriented in the sense that it is mainly – but not exclusively – concentrated on the most significant results obtained, sometimes with other searchers, by a team of French searchers who are or were full or associate members of the Centre d'Analyse et de Mathématique Sociale (CAMS).Cet article présente une vue d'ensemble de sept directions de recherche en théorie du consensus : résultats arrowiens, règles d'agrégation définies au moyen de fédérations, règles définies au moyen de distances, solutions de tournoi, domaines restreints, théories abstraites du consensus, questions de complexité et d'algorithmique. Ce panorama est orienté dans la mesure où il présente principalement – mais non exclusivement – les travaux les plus significatifs obtenus – quelquefois avec d'autres chercheurs – par une équipe de chercheurs français qui sont – ou ont été – membres pléniers ou associés du Centre d'Analyse et de Mathématique Sociale (CAMS)

A páros összehasonlításokon alapuló rangsorolás módszertani és alkalmazási kérdései = Methodological and applicational issues of paired comparison based ranking

A páros összehasonlításokkal történő rangsorolás egyaránt felmerül a döntéselmélet, a preferenciák modellezése, a társadalmi választások elmélete, a tudománymetria, a statisztika, a pszichológia, vagy a sport területén. Ilyen esetekben gyakran nincs lehetőség az alternatívák egyetlen, objektív skálán történő értékelésére, csak azok egymással való összevetésére. Ez három, részben összefüggő kérdést vet fel. Az első a vizsgált gyakorlati probléma matematikai reprezentációja, a második az így keletkező feladat megoldása, a harmadik a kapott eredmény értelmezése. Értekezésünk az első kettőre fókuszál, bár a 7. fejezetben szereplő alkalmazásban az utóbbira is kitérünk. ____ Paired comparison based ranking problems are given by a tournament matrix representing the performance of some objects against each other. They arise in many different fields like social choice theory (Chebotarev and Shamis, 1998), sports (Landau, 1895, 1914; Zermelo, 1929) or psychology (Thurstone, 1927). The usual goal is to determine a winner (possibly a set of winners) or a complete ranking for the objects. There were some attempts to link the two areas (i.e. Bouyssou (2004)), however, they achieved a limited success. We will deal only with the latter issue, allowing for different preference intensities (including ties), incomplete and multiple comparisons among the objects. The ranking includes three areas: representation of the practical problem as a mathematical model, its solution, and interpretation of the results. The third issue strongly depends on the actual application, therefore it is not addressed in the thesis, however, it will appear in Chapter 7

Metric and latticial medians

This paper presents the -linked- notions of metric and latticial medians and it explains what is the median procedure for the consensus problems, in particular in the case of the aggregation of linear orders. First we consider the medians of a v-tuple of arbitrary or particular binary relations.. Then we study in depth the difficult (in fact NP-difficult) problem of finding the median orders of a profile of linear orders. More generally, we consider the medians of v-tuples of elements of a semilattice and we describe the median semilattices, i.e. the semilattices were medians are easily computable.Ce texte présente les notions -reliées- de médianes métriques et latticielles et explique le rôle de la procédure médiane dans les problèmes de consensus, notamment dans le cas de l'agrégation d'ordres totaux.. Après avoir étudié les médianes d'un v-uple de relations binaires arbitraires ou particulières, on étudie en détail le problème -difficile (NP-difficile)- d'obtention des ordres médians d'un profil d'ordres totaux. Plus généralement on considère les médianes de v-uples d'éléments d'un demi-treillis (ou d'un treillis) et l'on décrit les demi-treillis à médianes,i.e. ceux où l'obtention des médianes est aisée

Hybrid Heuristics for the Linear Ordering Problem

The linear ordering problem (LOP) is one of the classical NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problems. Motivated by the difficulty of solving it up to optimality, in recent decades a great number of heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed. Despite the continuous work on this problem, there is still room nowadays for designing strategies that beat the state-of-the-art algorithms, and take a step forward in terms of the quality of the obtained solutions.In this paper, two novel schemes are presented. The first algorithm consists of an iterated local search algorithm that carries out an organized exploration of the search space. The second scheme is an extension of the previous algorithm that, based on the properties of the LOP, proposes an exact procedure that allows us to improve the quality of the solutions systematically. Conducted experiments on one of the hardest LOP benchmarks (xLOLIB) show that 77 new best results were found out of 78 instances. The described strategies also provide innovative ideas for developing more advanced algorithms for solving the LOP

A graph interpretation of the least squares ranking method

The paper aims at analyzing the least squares ranking method for generalized tournaments with possible missing and multiple paired comparisons. The bilateral relationships may reflect the out- comes of a sport competition, product comparisons, or evaluation of political candidates and policies. It is shown that the rating vector can be obtained as a limit point of an iterative process based on the scores in almost all cases. The calculation is interpreted on an undirected graph with loops attached to some nodes, revealing that the procedure takes into account not only the given object’s results but also the strength of objects compared with it. We explore the connection between this method and another procedure defined for ranking the nodes in a digraph, the positional power measure. The decomposition of the least squares solution offers a number of ways to modify the method

Markov-Chain-Based Heuristics for the Feedback Vertex Set Problem for Digraphs

A feedback vertex set (FVS) of an undirected or directed graph G=(V, A) is a set F such that G-F is acyclic. The minimum feedback vertex set problem asks for a FVS of G of minimum cardinality whereas the weighted minimum feedback vertex set problem consists of determining a FVS F of minimum weight w(F) given a real-valued weight function w. Both problems are NP-hard [Karp72]. Nethertheless, they have been found to have applications in many fields. So one is naturally interested in approximation algorithms. While most of the existing approximation algorithms for feedback vertex set problems rely on local properties of G only, this thesis explores strategies that use global information about G in order to determine good solutions. The pioneering work in this direction has been initiated by Speckenmeyer [Speckenmeyer89]. He demonstrated the use of Markov chains for determining low cardinality FVSs. Based on his ideas, new approximation algorithms are developed for both the unweighted and the weighted minimum feedback vertex set problem for digraphs. According to the experimental results presented in this thesis, these new algorithms outperform all other existing approximation algorithms. An additional contribution, not related to Markov chains, is the identification of a new class of digraphs G=(V, A) which permit the determination of an optimum FVS in time O(|V|^4). This class strictly encompasses the completely contractible graphs [Levy/Low88]