Preference fusion and Condorcet's Paradox under uncertainty

Facing an unknown situation, a person may not be able to firmly elicit his/her preferences over different alternatives, so he/she tends to express uncertain preferences. Given a community of different persons expressing their preferences over certain alternatives under uncertainty, to get a collective representative opinion of the whole community, a preference fusion process is required. The aim of this work is to propose a preference fusion method that copes with uncertainty and escape from the Condorcet paradox. To model preferences under uncertainty, we propose to develop a model of preferences based on belief function theory that accurately describes and captures the uncertainty associated with individual or collective preferences. This work improves and extends the previous results. This work improves and extends the contribution presented in a previous work. The benefits of our contribution are twofold. On the one hand, we propose a qualitative and expressive preference modeling strategy based on belief-function theory which scales better with the number of sources. On the other hand, we propose an incremental distance-based algorithm (using Jousselme distance) for the construction of the collective preference order to avoid the Condorcet Paradox.Comment: International Conference on Information Fusion, Jul 2017, Xi'an, Chin

A clustering model for uncertain preferences based on belief functions

International audienceCommunity detection is a popular topic in network science field. In social network analysis, preference is often applied as an attribute for individuals' representation. In some cases, uncertain and imprecise preferences may appear in some cases. Moreover, conflicting preferences can arise from multiple sources. From a model for imperfect preferences we proposed earlier, we study the clustering quality in case of perfect preferences as well as imperfect ones based on weak orders (orders that are complete, reflexive and transitive). The model for uncertain preferences is based on the theory of belief functions with an appropriate dissimilarity measure when performing the clustering steps. To evaluate the quality of clustering results, we used Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) and silhouette score on synthetic data as well as on Sushi preference data set collected from real world. The results show that our model has an equivalent quality with traditional preference representations for certain cases while it has better quality confronting imperfect cases