Three practical criteria of comparison among ordinal preference aggregating rules

Agents that must reach agreements with other agents need to reason about how their preferences, judgments, and beliefs might be aggregated with those of others by the social choice mechanisms that govern their interactions. The emerging field of judgment aggregation studies aggregation from a logical perspective, and considers how multiple sets of logical formulae can be aggregated to a single consistent set. As a special case, judgment aggregation can be seen to subsume classical preference aggregation. We present a modal logic that is intended to support reasoning about judgment aggregation scenarios (and hence, as a special case, about preference aggregation): the logical language is interpreted directly in judgment aggregation rules. We present a sound and complete axiomatisation. We show that the logic can express aggregation rules such as majority voting; rule properties such as independence; and results such as the discursive paradox, Arrow's theorem and Condorcet's paradox--which are derivable as formal theorems of the logic. The logic is parameterised in such a way that it can be used as a general framework for comparing the logical properties of different types of aggregation--including classical preference aggregation. As a case study we present a logical study of, including a formal proof of, the neutrality lemma, the main ingredient in a well-known proof of Arrow's theorem.

Agents that must reach agreements with other agents need to reason about how their preferences, judgments, and beliefs might be aggregated with those of others by the social choice mechanisms that govern their interactions. The recently emerging field of judgment aggregation studies aggregation from a logical perspective, and considers how multiple sets of logical formulae can be aggregated to a single consistent set. As a special case, judgment aggregation can be seen to subsume classical preference aggregation. We present a modal logic that is intended to support reasoning about judgment aggregation scenarios (and hence, as a special case, about preference aggregation): the logical language is interpreted directly in judgment aggregation rules. We present a sound and complete axiomatisation of such rules. We show that the logic can express aggregation rules such as majority voting; rule properties such as independence; and results such as the discursive paradox, Arrow's theorem and Condorcet's paradox - which are derivable as formal theorems of the logic. The logic is parameterised in such a way that it can be used as a general framework for comparing the logical properties of different types of aggregation - including classical preference aggregation.

Measures of inequality as an aggregation of individual preferences about income distribution: The arrowian case

Existing aggregation methods for large-scale data center power systems often overlook disparities in power supply units, leading to reduced accuracy in the small signal dynamics of aggregated model. To fill this gap, this article develops an impedance-based aggregation method for paralleled power factor correction (PFC) converters with heterogeneities in power levels, conduction modes, and line impedances. The closed-loop input admittances of PFC converters operating in continuous conduction mode (CCM) and discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) are presented first. The parametric scaling is then derived to aggregate multiple PFC converters at different power levels and operation modes, including the CCM, DCM, and mixed conduction mode, at the rack level. Furthermore, the aggregation rule and criteria for paralleled PFC converters with unequal line impedances is developed to provide a reduced-order dynamic model for adjacent server racks. The proposed parameter scaling and aggregation method allow efficient interaction analysis and stability assessment for data center power systems. The accuracy and robustness of the impedance-based aggregation are finally validated by simulations and experimental tests.

Information retrieval on RDF data benefits greatly from additional provenance information attached to the individual pieces of information. Provenance information such as origin of data, certainty, and temporal information on RDF statements can be used to rank search results according to one of those dimensions. In this paper, we consider the problem of aggregating provenance information from different dimensions in order to obtain a joint ranking over all dimensions. We relate this to the problem of preference aggregation in social choice theory and translate different solutions for preference aggregation to the problem of aggregating provenance rankings. By exploiting the ranking orderings on the provenance dimensions, we characterize three different approaches for aggregating preferences, namely the lexicographical rule, the Borda rule and the plurality rule, in our framework of provenance aggregation.

How can several individuals’ probability assignments to some events be aggregated into a collective probability assignment? Classic results on this problem assume that the set of relevant events—the agenda—is a sigma -algebra and is thus closed under disjunction (union) and conjunction (intersection). We drop this demanding assumption and explore probabilistic opinion pooling on general agendas. One might be interested in the probability of rain and that of an interest-rate increase, but not in the probability of rain or an interest-rate increase. We characterize linear pooling and neutral pooling for general agendas, with classic results as special cases for agendas that are sigma -algebras. As an illustrative application, we also consider probabilistic preference aggregation. Finally, we unify our results with existing results on binary judgment aggregation and Arrovian preference aggregation. We show that the same kinds of axioms (independence and consensus preservation) have radically different implications for different aggregation problems: linearity for probability aggregation and dictatorship for binary judgment or preference aggregation.

Many areas of study, such as information retrieval, collaborative filtering, and social choice face the preference aggregation problem, in which multiple preferences over objects must be combined into a consensus ranking. Preferences over items can be expressed in a variety of forms, which makes the aggregation problem difficult. In this work we formulate a flexible probabilistic model over pairwise comparisons that can accommodate all these forms. Inference in the model is very fast, making it applicable to problems with hundreds of thousands of preferences. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance to existing methods

To create privacy-friendly software designs, architects need comprehensive knowledge of existing privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) and their properties. Existing works that systemize PETs, however, are outdated or focus on comparison criteria rather than providing guidance for their practical selection. In this short paper we present an enhanced classification of PETs that is more application-oriented than previous proposals. It integrates existing criteria like the privacy protection goal, and also considers practical criteria like the functional context, a technology's maturity, and its impact on various non-functional requirements. We expect that our classification simplifies the selection of PETs for experts and non-experts.

In multiagent settings where the agents have different preferences, preference aggregation is a central issue. Voting is a general method for preference aggregation, but seminal results have shown that all general voting protocols are manipulable. One could try to avoid manipulation by using voting protocols where determining a beneficial manipulation is hard computationally. The complexity of manipulating realistic elections where the number of candidates is a small constant was recently studied [4], but the emphasis was on the question of whether or not a protocol becomes hard to manipulate for some constant number of candidates. That work, in many cases, left open the question: How many candidates are needed to make elections hard to manipulate? This is a crucial question when comparing the relative manipulability of different voting protocols. In this paper we answer that question for the voting protocols of the earlier study: plurality, Borda, STV, Copeland, maximin, regular cup, and randomized cup. We also answer that question for two voting protocols for which no results on the complexity of manipulation have been derived before: veto and plurality with runoff. It turns out that the voting protocols under study become hard to manipulate at 3 candidates, 4 candidates, 7 candidates, or never.

We consider the problem of preference aggregation in group decision making. The role of the collaborative imperative used by the group in determining the form of the aggregation function is noted. We focus on one collaborative imperative, called the primal, deriving from participant autonomy, an agent doesn't have to accept a decision by the group it doesn't like. We showed that t-norms and more generally the class of uninorms having zero fixation provide appropriate aggregation operators to implement this primal collaborative imperative. We then discuss the possibility of an agent using a strategic manipulation of its preference information to get its preferred alternative. A mechanism based upon the use of an importance weighting is then suggested for modifying the construction of the group decision function to defend against strategic manipulation.

Preference aggregation and judgment aggregation are two basic research models of group decision making. And preference aggregation has been deeply studied in social choice theory. However, researches of social choice theory gradually focus on judgment aggregation which appears recently. Judgment aggregation focuses on how to aggregate many consistent logical formulas into one, from the perspective of logic. We try to start with judgment aggregation model based on logic and then explore different solutions to problem of judgment aggregation.

The concentrations of ten elements in 209 unrelated glass specimens received as evidence were used to assess the frequencies of errors of false association (Type II errors) using several comparison criteria at specified significance levels (Type I errors). Pairwise comparisons of the samples using either the equal-variance t-test or Welch's modification (unequal variances) result in a small number of errors of false association, even when adjusting the significance level (Bonferroni correction) for multivariate comparisons. At the 95% confidence level (overall Type I error of 0.05, or individual element comparison error of 0.005), only two Type II errors are made in 21736 comparisons (0.009%) when using the equal-variance t-test for comparison of sample means. In this study, the range overlap test using three replicate measurements per specimen results in no errors of false association. Most specimen pairs in this data set are readily discriminated either by differences in the concentrations of several elements or by an extremely large difference in the concentrations of one or more element.

본 연구에서는 최근에 새롭게 개발된 X-13A-S 프로그램을 이용하여 우리나라 경제시계열에 적합한 계절조정방법을 모색하였다. 특히 한국의 주요 거시경제지표에 대하여 X-12 필터와 SEATS 방법을 각각 적용하여 계절조정계열을 산출하고, 안정성 멱등성 등 계절조정의 적합성 평가기준을 토대로 두 방법의 유용성에 대한 이론적 실증적 비교분석을 시도하였다. 본 연구의 분석에 의하면 두 방법 모두 안정성이 우수한 것으로 나타나 계절조정의 신뢰성은 높은 것으로 평가되었다. 두 방법 사이의 상대적 비교에서는 대상 자료에 따라 약간 다른 결과를 보이고 있기는 하지만 전체적으로 모형에 기초하여 계절조정을 시행하는 SEATS 방법이 우월한 것으로 나타났다. 특히 구조변화를 고려하여 구간을 나누어 계절변동조정을 시행하면, 전체 기간에 대한 분석에 비해 SEATS 방법에 상대적으로 더 유리한 결과가 도출되었다. 이는 모형 분석에 기초를 둔 TRAMO-SEATS 방법이 계절조정의 이론적 정합성 및 일관성 측면에서 더 우수하다는 최근의 학문적인 연구 결과와 일치한다. 이러한 결과는 그 동안 현재 국내에서 사용되고 있는 X-12-ARIMA 방법 이외에 TRAMO-SEATS 방법을 한국 경제시계열 자료에 적용할 필요성이 있다는 것을 암시하는 것이라 할 수 있다. 따라서 향후 X-13A-S 프로그램과 같이 두 방법을 같이 병행하면서 이를 우리 자료에 맞게 조정하는 방안에 관한 지속적인 연구가 필요하다. 이를 통해 계량모형에 기초한 TRAMO-SEATS 방법의 이론적 정합성과 X-12-ARIMA 방법의 실증적 적합성을 결합시킬 수 있는 새로운 차원의 계절조정방법을 계속 모색해야 한다. This paper compares the two most widely used seasonal adjustment methods: the X-12-ARIMA and TRAMO-SEATS procedures. The basic features of these methods are discussed and compared in both their theoretical and empirical aspects. In doing so, the X-13A-S program is used to reevaluate their applicability to Korean macroeconomic data by considering possible structural breaks in the series. The finding is that both methods provide very reliable and stable estimates of seasonal factors and seasonally adjusted data. As for the empirical comparisons, TRAMO-SEATS appears to outperform X-12-ARIMA, although the results are somewhat mixed depending on the comparison criteria used and on the series under analysis. In particular, the performance of TRAMO-SEATS turns out to compare more favorably when seasonal adjustment is carried out to each sub-samples (by taking possible structural breaks into account) than when the whole sample period is used. The result suggests that as the model-based TRAMO-SEATS has a considerable theoretical appeal, some features of TRAMO-SEATS should further be incorporated into X-12-ARIMA until a standard and integrated procedure is reached by combining the theoretical coherence of TRAMO-SEATS and the empirical usefulness of X-12-ARIMA.

We develop a general, formal model of social choice in which voters have continuous preferences over a one-dimensional space. Our model is parameterized by different restrictions that we introduce regarding the way voter preferences change in time as well as the optimization criteria (that correspond to a normative continuum of fairness definitions) desired from an aggregation method---that outputs a continuous, one-dimensional curve---given such inputs. We discuss the applicability of the model to different real-world situations and, as a first step towards an analysis of the different model realizations, we concentrate on identifying those cases that are computationally feasible to compute.

Group Recommendation (GR) is the task of suggesting relevant items/events for a group of users in online systems, whose major challenge is to aggregate the preferences of group members to infer the decision of a group. Prior group recommendation methods applied predefined static strategies for preference aggregation. However, these static strategies are insufficient to model the complicated decision making process of a group, especially for occasional groups which are formed adhoc. Compared to conventional individual recommendation task, GR is rather dynamic and each group member may contribute differently to the final group decision. Recent works argue that group members should have non-uniform weights in forming the decision of a group, and try to utilize a standard attention mechanism to aggregate the preferences of group members, but they do not model the interaction behavior among group members, and the decision making process is largely unexplored.In this work, we study GR in a more general scenario, that is Occasional Group Recommendation (OGR), and focus on solving the preference aggregation problem and the data sparsity issue of group-item interactions. Instead of exploring new heuristic or vanilla attention-based mechanism, we propose a new social self-attention based aggregation strategy by directly modeling the interactions among group members, namely Group Self-Attention (GroupSA). In GroupSA, we treat the group decision making process as multiple voting processes, and develop a stacked social self-attention network to simulate how a group consensus is reached. To overcome the data sparsity issue, we resort to the relatively abundant user-item and user-user interaction data, and enhance the representation of users by two types of aggregation methods. In the training process, we further propose a joint training method to learn the user/item embeddings in the group-item recommendation task and the user-item recommendation task simultaneously. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed GroupSA method compared to several state-of-the-art methods in terms of HR and NDCG.