解决投票规则在区间偏好下的计算难题,给出高效算法并揭示新领域关系。
Computing Thiele Rules on Interval Elections and their Generalizations
- 利用线性规划与整数解特性,设计快速算法求解区间投票中的比例代表规则
- 证明在用户-候选人区间域中仍存在最优整数解,突破此前复杂度未知的瓶颈
- 揭示线性一致域严格包含区间域,为投票理论提供新视角,适合社会选择研究者
基于批准制的委员会投票受到社会选择领域的广泛关注。其中,Thiele 规则,特别是比例批准投票(PAV),因其具有比例代表性、帕累托最优和支持单调性等优良性质而突出。其主要缺点是计算结果通常为 NP-hard。然而,在候选者区间(CI)域下,可通过具有完全单模约束矩阵的线性规划(LP)在多项式时间内求解。令人意外的是,该方法在相关用户区间(VI)域中失效,其复杂性长期未解。本文主要结论解决了这一问题:尽管相关矩阵非完全单模,但标准 LP 仍至少存在一个最优整数解,并提供了快速寻找该解的算法。该技术自然推广至用户-候选人区间(VCI)域(又称一维用户-候选人范围,1D-VCR)和线性一致(LC)域,两者均广义化了候选者与用户区间域。尽管两者均被研究过,其关系尚不明确。我们通过图论联系发现,LC 严格包含 VCI。此外,我们提出一个更贴近 VCI 精神的 LC 的替代定义,并赋予其在批准投票中的自然解释;该等价性或具独立意义。最后,我们研究了另一种基于树的 VCI 推广,发现在此域上 Thiele 规则的计算变为 NP-hard。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Approval-based committee voting has received significant attention in the social choice community. Among the studied rules, Thiele rules, and especially Proportional Approval Voting (PAV), stand out for desirable properties such as proportional representation, Pareto optimality, and support monotonicity. Their main drawback is that computing a Thiele outcome is NP-hard in general. A glimpse of hope comes from the fact that Thiele rules are better behaved under structured preferences. On the candidate interval (CI) domain, they are computable in polynomial time via a linear program (LP) that has a totally unimodular constraint matrix. Surprisingly, this approach fails for the related voter interval (VI) domain, and the complexity of the problem has repeatedly been posed as an open question. Our main result resolves this question: although the relevant matrix is not totally unimodular, the ``standard'' LP still admits at least one optimal integral solution, and we provide a fast algorithm for finding it. Our technique naturally extends to the voter-candidate interval (VCI) domain, also known as the 1-dimensional voter-candidate range (1D-VCR) domain, and to the linearly consistent (LC) domain, both of which generalize the candidate and voter interval domains. Although both the VCI and LC domains have been studied in social choice, their relationship was unknown. We show, through connections to graph theory, that LC strictly contains VCI. We also provide an alternative definition of LC that is closer in spirit to VCI and has a natural interpretation in approval elections; this equivalence may be of independent interest. Finally, we study an alternative tree-based generalization of VCI and show that Thiele rules become NP-hard to compute on this domain.
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