提出新型拓扑距离,提升投票数据噪声鲁棒性
Topological Social Choice: Designing a Noise-Robust Polar Distance for Persistence Diagrams
- 基于极坐标设计可微分拓扑距离,捕捉特征大小与方向
- 在扰动下稳定性优于经典瓶颈/沃尔什距离,支持梯度学习
- 首次将持久同调用于社会选择,适合政治经济建模研究者
拓扑数据分析(TDA)已成为从高维噪声数据中提取稳健、可解释特征的强大框架。在偏好结构丰富但对扰动敏感的社会选择理论中,TDA仍基本未被探索。本文提出一种新概念桥梁,构建针对噪声偏好数据的持久图新度量框架。定义一种基于极坐标的距离,以平滑且可微方式捕捉拓扑特征的大小与方向。该度量克服了经典距离(如瓶颈距离、沃尔什距离)在扰动下的不稳定性、连续性缺失及不兼容梯度学习等关键缺陷。理论与实证均表明其表现更优。据我们所知,这是首个系统将持久同调应用于社会选择系统的研究,为比较投票结构与偏好动态的拓扑摘要提供了数学基础方法。通过大量实验验证其优越性,包括鲁棒性测试与监督学习任务,并提出从在线偏好数据构建预测模型的模块化流程。本工作为拓扑与决策理论交叉领域贡献了一种概念新颖、计算高效的工具,开启了可解释机器学习在政治经济系统中的新方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) has emerged as a powerful framework for extracting robust and interpretable features from noisy high-dimensional data. In the context of Social Choice Theory, where preference profiles and collective decisions are geometrically rich yet sensitive to perturbations, TDA remains largely unexplored. This work introduces a novel conceptual bridge between these domains by proposing a new metric framework for persistence diagrams tailored to noisy preference data.We define a polar coordinate-based distance that captures both the magnitude and orientation of topological features in a smooth and differentiable manner. Our metric addresses key limitations of classical distances, such as bottleneck and Wasserstein, including instability under perturbation, lack of continuity, and incompatibility with gradient-based learning. The resulting formulation offers improved behavior in both theoretical and applied settings.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically apply persistent homology to social choice systems, providing a mathematically grounded method for comparing topological summaries of voting structures and preference dynamics. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach through extensive experiments, including robustness tests and supervised learning tasks, and we propose a modular pipeline for building predictive models from online preference data. This work contributes a conceptually novel and computationally effective tool to the emerging interface of topology and decision theory, opening new directions in interpretable machine learning for political and economic systems.
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