14,129 research outputs found
The Complexity of Computing Minimal Unidirectional Covering Sets
Given a binary dominance relation on a set of alternatives, a common thread
in the social sciences is to identify subsets of alternatives that satisfy
certain notions of stability. Examples can be found in areas as diverse as
voting theory, game theory, and argumentation theory. Brandt and Fischer [BF08]
proved that it is NP-hard to decide whether an alternative is contained in some
inclusion-minimal upward or downward covering set. For both problems, we raise
this lower bound to the Theta_{2}^{p} level of the polynomial hierarchy and
provide a Sigma_{2}^{p} upper bound. Relatedly, we show that a variety of other
natural problems regarding minimal or minimum-size covering sets are hard or
complete for either of NP, coNP, and Theta_{2}^{p}. An important consequence of
our results is that neither minimal upward nor minimal downward covering sets
(even when guaranteed to exist) can be computed in polynomial time unless P=NP.
This sharply contrasts with Brandt and Fischer's result that minimal
bidirectional covering sets (i.e., sets that are both minimal upward and
minimal downward covering sets) are polynomial-time computable.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure
Recognizing Members of the Tournament Equilibrium Set is NP-hard
A recurring theme in the mathematical social sciences is how to select the
"most desirable" elements given a binary dominance relation on a set of
alternatives. Schwartz's tournament equilibrium set (TEQ) ranks among the most
intriguing, but also among the most enigmatic, tournament solutions that have
been proposed so far in this context. Due to its unwieldy recursive definition,
little is known about TEQ. In particular, its monotonicity remains an open
problem up to date. Yet, if TEQ were to satisfy monotonicity, it would be a
very attractive tournament solution concept refining both the Banks set and
Dutta's minimal covering set. We show that the problem of deciding whether a
given alternative is contained in TEQ is NP-hard.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure
07431 Abstracts Collection -- Computational Issues in Social Choice
From the 21st to the 26th of October 2007, the Dagstuhl Seminar 07431
on ``Computational Issues in Social Choice\u27\u27 was held
at the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl.
During the seminar, several participants presented their recent
research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed.
The abstracts of the talks given during the seminar are collected in this paper.
The first section summarises the seminar topics and goals in general.
Links to full papers are provided where available
Ackermannian and Primitive-Recursive Bounds with Dickson's Lemma
Dickson's Lemma is a simple yet powerful tool widely used in termination
proofs, especially when dealing with counters or related data structures.
However, most computer scientists do not know how to derive complexity upper
bounds from such termination proofs, and the existing literature is not very
helpful in these matters.
We propose a new analysis of the length of bad sequences over (N^k,\leq) and
explain how one may derive complexity upper bounds from termination proofs. Our
upper bounds improve earlier results and are essentially tight
An Order-based Algorithm for Minimum Dominating Set with Application in Graph Mining
Dominating set is a set of vertices of a graph such that all other vertices
have a neighbour in the dominating set. We propose a new order-based randomised
local search (RLS) algorithm to solve minimum dominating set problem in
large graphs. Experimental evaluation is presented for multiple types of
problem instances. These instances include unit disk graphs, which represent a
model of wireless networks, random scale-free networks, as well as samples from
two social networks and real-world graphs studied in network science. Our
experiments indicate that RLS performs better than both a classical greedy
approximation algorithm and two metaheuristic algorithms based on ant colony
optimisation and local search. The order-based algorithm is able to find small
dominating sets for graphs with tens of thousands of vertices. In addition, we
propose a multi-start variant of RLS that is suitable for solving the
minimum weight dominating set problem. The application of RLS in graph
mining is also briefly demonstrated
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