Improved Parameterized Algorithms for the Kemeny Aggregation Problem

We give improvements over fixed parameter tractable (FPT) algo-rithms to solve the Kemeny aggregation problem, where the task is to summarize a multi-set of preference lists, called votes, over a set of alternatives, called candidates, into a single preference list that has the minimum total τ-distance from the votes. The τ-distance between two preference lists is the number of pairs of candidates that are or-dered differently in the two lists. We study the problem for preference lists that are total orders. We develop algorithms of running times O∗(1.403kt), O∗(5.823kt/m) ≤ O∗(5.823kavg) and O∗(4.829kmax) for the problem, ignoring the polynomial factors in the O ∗ notation, where kt is the optimum total τ-distance, m is the number of votes, and kavg (resp, kmax) is the average (resp, maximum) over pairwise τ-distances of votes. Our algorithms improve the best previously known running times of O∗(1.53kt) and O∗(16kavg) ≤ O∗(16kmax) [4, 5], which also implies an O∗(164kt/m) running time. We also show how to enumerate all optimal solutions in O∗(36kt/m) ≤ O∗(36kavg) time.

Fixed-Parameter Algorithms for Computing Kemeny Scores - Theory and Practice

The central problem in this work is to compute a ranking of a set of elements which is "closest to" a given set of input rankings of the elements. We define "closest to" in an established way as having the minimum sum of Kendall-Tau distances to each input ranking. Unfortunately, the resulting problem Kemeny consensus is NP-hard for instances with n input rankings, n being an even integer greater than three. Nevertheless this problem plays a central role in many rank aggregation problems. It was shown that one can compute the corresponding Kemeny consensus list in f(k) + poly(n) time, being f(k) a computable function in one of the parameters "score of the consensus", "maximum distance between two input rankings", "number of candidates" and "average pairwise Kendall-Tau distance" and poly(n) a polynomial in the input size. This work will demonstrate the practical usefulness of the corresponding algorithms by applying them to randomly generated and several real-world data. Thus, we show that these fixed-parameter algorithms are not only of theoretical interest. In a more theoretical part of this work we will develop an improved fixed-parameter algorithm for the parameter "score of the consensus" having a better upper bound for the running time than previous algorithms.Comment: Studienarbei

Parameterized Algorithmics for Computational Social Choice: Nine Research Challenges

Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving Economics, Political Science, and Social Science on the one side, and Mathematics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems) on the other side. Typical computational problems studied in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks, or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of problems appearing in this context

Kernels for Feedback Arc Set In Tournaments

A tournament T=(V,A) is a directed graph in which there is exactly one arc between every pair of distinct vertices. Given a digraph on n vertices and an integer parameter k, the Feedback Arc Set problem asks whether the given digraph has a set of k arcs whose removal results in an acyclic digraph. The Feedback Arc Set problem restricted to tournaments is known as the k-Feedback Arc Set in Tournaments (k-FAST) problem. In this paper we obtain a linear vertex kernel for k-FAST. That is, we give a polynomial time algorithm which given an input instance T to k-FAST obtains an equivalent instance T' on O(k) vertices. In fact, given any fixed e>0, the kernelized instance has at most (2+e)k vertices. Our result improves the previous known bound of O(k^2) on the kernel size for k-FAST. Our kernelization algorithm solves the problem on a subclass of tournaments in polynomial time and uses a known polynomial time approximation scheme for k-FAST

Regression and Learning to Rank Aggregation for User Engagement Evaluation

User engagement refers to the amount of interaction an instance (e.g., tweet, news, and forum post) achieves. Ranking the items in social media websites based on the amount of user participation in them, can be used in different applications, such as recommender systems. In this paper, we consider a tweet containing a rating for a movie as an instance and focus on ranking the instances of each user based on their engagement, i.e., the total number of retweets and favorites it will gain. For this task, we define several features which can be extracted from the meta-data of each tweet. The features are partitioned into three categories: user-based, movie-based, and tweet-based. We show that in order to obtain good results, features from all categories should be considered. We exploit regression and learning to rank methods to rank the tweets and propose to aggregate the results of regression and learning to rank methods to achieve better performance. We have run our experiments on an extended version of MovieTweeting dataset provided by ACM RecSys Challenge 2014. The results show that learning to rank approach outperforms most of the regression models and the combination can improve the performance significantly.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Recommender Systems Challenge, RecSysChallenge '1

Быстрая согласованность по Кемени на основе поиска по стандартным матрицам с минимальным расстоянием до усредненного экспертного ранжирования

Проблематика. Розглядається задача ранжування скінченної множини об’єктів. Мета дослідження. Розробка алгоритму, який дав би змогу пришвидшити пошук узгодженості за Кемені поряд з обґрунтуванням метрики для порівняння ранжувань. Методика реалізації. Пропонується й обґрунтовується підхід щодо об’єднання експертних ранжувань. Також пропонується й обґрунтовується метрика для порівняння ранжувань. Результати дослідження. Розроблений алгоритм знаходить множину ранжувань Кемені значно швидше, ніж класичний прямий пошук. Також ця множина часто містить єдину узгодженість за Кемені, що не вдається за прямого пошуку. Крім цього, єдина узгодженість за Кемені визначається відразу, якщо усереднене експертне ранжування виявляється ациклічним. Так розв’язується задача вибору єдиної узгодженості за Кемені. Висновки. Для 10 і більше об’єктів, де більшість відомих підходів стають незастосовними, алгоритм є реалізовним завдяки пошуку по тільки тих стандартних матрицях, чия відстань до першого ранжування відрізняється від відстані між цим ранжуванням та усередненим експертним ранжуванням на мінімальну величину.Background. The problem of ranking a finite set of objects is considered. Objective. The goal is to develop an algorithm that would let speed up the search of the Kemeny consensus along with substantiation of a metric to compare rankings. Methods. An approach for aggregating experts’ rankings is suggested and substantiated. Also a metric to compare rankings is suggested and substantiated. Results. The developed algorithm finds a set of Kemeny rankings much faster than the classical straightforward search. Also this set often contains a single Kemeny consensus, what fails by the straightforward search. Besides, a single Kemeny consensus is determined at one stroke if the averaged expert ranking turns out acyclic. Thus the problem of selecting a single Kemeny consensus is solved. Conclusions. For 10 objects and more, where most known approaches become intractable, the algorithm still is tractable due to searching over only those standard matrices whose distance to the first ranking differs minimally from the distance between this ranking and the averaged expert ranking.Проблематика. Рассматривается задача ранжирования конечного множества объектов. Цель исследования. Разработка алгоритма, который позволил бы ускорить поиск согласованности по Кемени вместе с обоснованием метрики для сравнения ранжирований. Методика реализации. Предлагается и обосновывается подход относительно объединения экспертных ранжирований. Также предлагается и обосновывается метрика для сравнения ранжирований. Результаты исследования. Разработанный алгоритм находит множество ранжирований Кемени гораздо быстрее, чем классический прямой поиск. Также это множество часто содержит единственную согласованность по Кемени, что не удается при прямом поиске. Кроме этого, единственная согласованность по Кемени определяется сразу, если усредненное экспертное ранжирование оказывается ациклическим. Так решается задача выбора единственной согласованности по Кемени. Выводы. Для 10 и более объектов, где большинство известных подходов становятся неисполнимыми, алгоритм является осуществимым благодаря поиску по только тем стандартным матрицам, чье расстояние к первому ранжированию отличается от расстояния между этим ранжированием и усредненным экспертным ранжированием на минимальную величину

Order-Related Problems Parameterized by Width

In the main body of this thesis, we study two different order theoretic problems. The first problem, called Completion of an Ordering, asks to extend a given finite partial order to a complete linear order while respecting some weight constraints. The second problem is an order reconfiguration problem under width constraints. While the Completion of an Ordering problem is NP-complete, we show that it lies in FPT when parameterized by the interval width of ρ. This ordering problem can be used to model several ordering problems stemming from diverse application areas, such as graph drawing, computational social choice, and computer memory management. Each application yields a special partial order ρ. We also relate the interval width of ρ to parameterizations for these problems that have been studied earlier in the context of these applications, sometimes improving on parameterized algorithms that have been developed for these parameterizations before. This approach also gives some practical sub-exponential time algorithms for ordering problems. In our second main result, we combine our parameterized approach with the paradigm of solution diversity. The idea of solution diversity is that instead of aiming at the development of algorithms that output a single optimal solution, the goal is to investigate algorithms that output a small set of sufficiently good solutions that are sufficiently diverse from one another. In this way, the user has the opportunity to choose the solution that is most appropriate to the context at hand. It also displays the richness of the solution space. There, we show that the considered diversity version of the Completion of an Ordering problem is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to natural paramaters that capture the notion of diversity and the notion of sufficiently good solutions. We apply this algorithm in the study of the Kemeny Rank Aggregation class of problems, a well-studied class of problems lying in the intersection of order theory and social choice theory. Up to this point, we have been looking at problems where the goal is to find an optimal solution or a diverse set of good solutions. In the last part, we shift our focus from finding solutions to studying the solution space of a problem. There we consider the following order reconfiguration problem: Given a graph G together with linear orders τ and τ ′ of the vertices of G, can one transform τ into τ ′ by a sequence of swaps of adjacent elements in such a way that at each time step the resulting linear order has cutwidth (pathwidth) at most w? We show that this problem always has an affirmative answer when the input linear orders τ and τ ′ have cutwidth (pathwidth) at most w/2. Using this result, we establish a connection between two apparently unrelated problems: the reachability problem for two-letter string rewriting systems and the graph isomorphism problem for graphs of bounded cutwidth. This opens an avenue for the study of the famous graph isomorphism problem using techniques from term rewriting theory. In addition to the main part of this work, we present results on two unrelated problems, namely on the Steiner Tree problem and on the Intersection Non-emptiness problem from automata theory.Doktorgradsavhandlin

09171 Abstracts Collection -- Adaptive, Output Sensitive, Online and Parameterized Algorithms

From 19.01. to 24.04.2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09171 ``Adaptive, Output Sensitive, Online and Parameterized Algorithms \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Parameterized Enumeration of Neighbour Strings and Kemeny Aggregations

In this thesis, we consider approaches to enumeration problems in the parameterized complexity setting. We obtain competitive parameterized algorithms to enumerate all, as well as several of, the solutions for two related problems Neighbour String and Kemeny Rank Aggregation. In both problems, the goal is to find a solution that is as close as possible to a set of inputs (strings and total orders, respectively) according to some distance measure. We also introduce a notion of enumerative kernels for which there is a bijection between solutions to the original instance and solutions to the kernel, and provide such a kernel for Kemeny Rank Aggregation, improving a previous kernel for the problem. We demonstrate how several of the algorithms and notions discussed in this thesis are extensible to a group of parameterized problems, improving published results for some other problems