A testbed to enable comparisons between competing approaches for
 computational social choice

John A.  Doucette; Robin  Cohen

doi:10.3934/bdia.2016013

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October 2016, 1(4): 309-340. doi: 10.3934/bdia.2016013

A testbed to enable comparisons between competing approaches for computational social choice

John A. Doucette ^1,, and Robin Cohen ^2,

1.	University of Waterloo & New College of Florida, 5800 Bayshore Road, Sarasota, FL 34234, USA
2.	University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada

* Corresponding author: John A. Doucette

The authors acknowledge support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, and the University of Waterloo

Revised April 2017 Published April 2017

Within artificial intelligence, the field of computational social choice studies the application of AI techniques to the problem of group decision making, especially through systems where each agent submits a vote taking the form of a total ordering over the alternatives (a preference). Reaching a reasonable decision becomes more difficult when some agents are unwilling or unable to rank all the alternatives, and appropriate voting systems must be devised to handle the resulting incomplete preference information. In this paper, we present a detailed testbed which can be used to perform information analytics in this domain. We illustrate the testbed in action for the context of determining a winner or putting candidates into ranked order, using data from realworld elections, and demonstrate how to use the results of the testbed to produce effective comparisons between competing algorithms.

Keywords: Information analytics for voting systems, computational social choice, machine learning, partial preferences, testbeds.

Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary: 91B14, 91B10; Secondary: 68T3.

Citation: John A. Doucette, Robin Cohen. A testbed to enable comparisons between competing approaches for computational social choice. Big Data & Information Analytics, 2016, 1 (4) : 309-340. doi: 10.3934/bdia.2016013

References:

[1]	H. Azari, D. Parkes and L. Xia, Random Utility Theory for Social Choice, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS Foundation, (2012), 126-134. Google Scholar
[2]	A. Balz and R. Senge, WEKA-LR: A Label Ranking Extension for WEKA, URL http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb12/kebi/research/software/labelrankdoc.pdf. Google Scholar
[3]	S. Bouveret, Whale3 -WHich ALternative is Elected, URL http://strokes.imag.fr/whale3/. Google Scholar
[4]	F. Brandt, G. Chabin and C. Geist, Pnyx: A Powerful and User-friendly Tool for Preference Aggregation, in Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, (2015), 1915-1916. Google Scholar
[5]	C.-C. Chang and C.-J. Lin, LIBSVM: a library for support vector machines, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 2 (2011), 27-66. doi: 10.1145/1961189.1961199. Google Scholar
[6]	G. Charwat and A. Pfandler, Democratix: A Declarative Approach to Winner Determination, in Algorithmic Decision Theory, Springer, (2015), 253-269. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-23114-3_16. Google Scholar
[7]	C. Cortes and V. Vapnik, Support-vector networks, Machine Learning, 20 (1995), 273-297. doi: 10.1007/BF00994018. Google Scholar
[8]	J. Dean and S. Ghemawat, MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters, Communications of the ACM, 51 (2008), 107-113. doi: 10.1145/1327452.1327492. Google Scholar
[9]	P. Diaconis and R.L. Graham, Spearman's footrule as a measure of disarray, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), (), 262-268. Google Scholar
[10]	J.P. Dickerson, A.D. Procaccia and T. Sandholm, Price of fairness in kidney exchange, in Proceedings of the 2014 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, (2014), 1013-1020. Google Scholar
[11]	E. Dimitriadou, K. Hornik, F. Leisch, D. Meyer and A. Weingessel, Misc functions of the Department of Statistics (e1071), TU Wien, R package, 1 (2008), 5-24. Google Scholar
[12]	J. A. Doucette, K. Larson and R. Cohen, Conventional machine learning for social choice, in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, 2015. Google Scholar
[13]	G. H. Dunteman, Principal Components Analysis, no. 69 in Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, Sage, 1989. Google Scholar
[14]	V. E. Farrugia, H. P. Martínez and G. N. Yannakakis, The preference learning toolbox, arXiv preprint arXiv: 1506. 01709. Google Scholar
[15]	M. Gebser, B. Kaufmann, R. Kaminski, M. Ostrowski, T. Schaub and M. Schneider, Potassco: The Potsdam answer set solving collection, AI Communications, 24 (2011), 107-124. Google Scholar
[16]	M. Gelfond and V. Lifschitz, Classical negation in logic programs and disjunctive databases, New Generation Computing, 9 (1991), 365-385. doi: 10.1007/BF03037169. Google Scholar
[17]	J. Goldman and A.D. Procaccia, Spliddit: Unleashing fair division algorithms, ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 13 (2015), 41-46. doi: 10.1145/2728732.2728738. Google Scholar
[18]	M. Hall, E. Frank, G. Holmes, B. Pfahringer, P. Reutemann and I.H. Witten, The WEKA data mining software: an update, ACM SIGKDD explorations newsletter, 11 (2009), 10-18. doi: 10.1145/1656274.1656278. Google Scholar
[19]	L. Hatton, The T-experiments: errors in scientific software, Quality of Numerical Software, (1997), 12-31. doi: 10.1007/978-1-5041-2940-4_2. Google Scholar
[20]	L. Hatton and A. Roberts, How accurate is scientific software?, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 20 (1994), 785-797. doi: 10.1109/32.328993. Google Scholar
[21]	M. R. Hestenes and E. Stiefel, Methods of Conjugate Gradients for Solving Linear Systems 1 Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards, 49. Google Scholar
[22]	E. Hüllermeier and J. Fürnkranz, Learning from label preferences, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Discovery Science, (2011), 2-17. Google Scholar
[23]	T. Joachims, Optimizing search engines using clickthrough data, Proceedings of the Eighth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, (2002), 133-142. doi: 10.1145/775047.775067. Google Scholar
[24]	T. Joachims, Training linear SVMs in linear time, Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, (2006), 217-226. doi: 10.1145/1150402.1150429. Google Scholar
[25]	D. Kelly and R. Sanders, The challenge of testing scientific software, In Proceedings of the 2008 Conference for the Association for Software Testing, (2008), 30-36. Google Scholar
[26]	M.G. Kendall, A new measure of rank correlation, Biometrika, 30 (1938), 81-93. doi: 10.1093/biomet/49.1-2.133. Google Scholar
[27]	S. Kullback and R.A. Leibler, On information and sufficiency, The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 22 (1951), 79-86. doi: 10.1214/aoms/1177729694. Google Scholar
[28]	T. Lu and C. Boutilier, Learning Mallows models with pairwise preferences, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-11), (2011), 145-152. Google Scholar
[29]	T. Lu and C. Boutilier, Robust approximation and incremental elicitation in voting protocols, Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (2011), 287-213. Google Scholar
[30]	R. D. Luce, Individual Choice Behavior: A Theoretical Analysis, Wiley, 1959. Google Scholar
[31]	C.L. Mallows, Non-null ranking models. I, Biometrika, 44 (1957), 114-130. doi: 10.1093/biomet/44.1-2.114. Google Scholar
[32]	N. Mattei and T. Walsh, Preflib: A library for preferences http://www.preflib.org, in Algorithmic Decision Theory, Springer, 2013, 259-270. Google Scholar
[33]	N. Matti, PrefLib-Tools: A small and lightweight set of Python tools for working with and generating data from www. PrefLib. org. , URL https://github.com/nmattei/PrefLib-Tools. Google Scholar
[34]	R. Rifkin and A. Klautau, In defense of one-vs-all classification, The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 5 (2004), 101-141. Google Scholar
[35]	B. Ripley and W. Venables, nnet: Feed-forward neural networks and multinomial log-linear models, R package version, 7. Google Scholar
[36]	P. Romanski, FSelector: Selecting attributes, Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Google Scholar
[37]	C. Spearman, 'Footrule' for measuring correlation, British Journal of Psychology, 1904-1920, (1906), 89-108. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1906.tb00174.x. Google Scholar
[38]	J.E. Stone, D. Gohara and G. Shi, OpenCL: A parallel programming standard for heterogeneous computing systems, Computing in Science & Engineering, 12 (2010), 66-73. doi: 10.1109/MCSE.2010.69. Google Scholar
[39]	R. C. Team, R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. 2013, ISBN 3-900051-07-0, 2014 Google Scholar
[40]	L. Xia and V. Conitzer, Determining Possible and Necessary Winners under Common Voting Rules Given Partial Orders., Proceedings of the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (2008), 196-201. Google Scholar

show all references

References:

[1]	H. Azari, D. Parkes and L. Xia, Random Utility Theory for Social Choice, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS Foundation, (2012), 126-134. Google Scholar
[2]	A. Balz and R. Senge, WEKA-LR: A Label Ranking Extension for WEKA, URL http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb12/kebi/research/software/labelrankdoc.pdf. Google Scholar
[3]	S. Bouveret, Whale3 -WHich ALternative is Elected, URL http://strokes.imag.fr/whale3/. Google Scholar
[4]	F. Brandt, G. Chabin and C. Geist, Pnyx: A Powerful and User-friendly Tool for Preference Aggregation, in Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, (2015), 1915-1916. Google Scholar
[5]	C.-C. Chang and C.-J. Lin, LIBSVM: a library for support vector machines, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 2 (2011), 27-66. doi: 10.1145/1961189.1961199. Google Scholar
[6]	G. Charwat and A. Pfandler, Democratix: A Declarative Approach to Winner Determination, in Algorithmic Decision Theory, Springer, (2015), 253-269. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-23114-3_16. Google Scholar
[7]	C. Cortes and V. Vapnik, Support-vector networks, Machine Learning, 20 (1995), 273-297. doi: 10.1007/BF00994018. Google Scholar
[8]	J. Dean and S. Ghemawat, MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters, Communications of the ACM, 51 (2008), 107-113. doi: 10.1145/1327452.1327492. Google Scholar
[9]	P. Diaconis and R.L. Graham, Spearman's footrule as a measure of disarray, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), (), 262-268. Google Scholar
[10]	J.P. Dickerson, A.D. Procaccia and T. Sandholm, Price of fairness in kidney exchange, in Proceedings of the 2014 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, (2014), 1013-1020. Google Scholar
[11]	E. Dimitriadou, K. Hornik, F. Leisch, D. Meyer and A. Weingessel, Misc functions of the Department of Statistics (e1071), TU Wien, R package, 1 (2008), 5-24. Google Scholar
[12]	J. A. Doucette, K. Larson and R. Cohen, Conventional machine learning for social choice, in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, 2015. Google Scholar
[13]	G. H. Dunteman, Principal Components Analysis, no. 69 in Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, Sage, 1989. Google Scholar
[14]	V. E. Farrugia, H. P. Martínez and G. N. Yannakakis, The preference learning toolbox, arXiv preprint arXiv: 1506. 01709. Google Scholar
[15]	M. Gebser, B. Kaufmann, R. Kaminski, M. Ostrowski, T. Schaub and M. Schneider, Potassco: The Potsdam answer set solving collection, AI Communications, 24 (2011), 107-124. Google Scholar
[16]	M. Gelfond and V. Lifschitz, Classical negation in logic programs and disjunctive databases, New Generation Computing, 9 (1991), 365-385. doi: 10.1007/BF03037169. Google Scholar
[17]	J. Goldman and A.D. Procaccia, Spliddit: Unleashing fair division algorithms, ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 13 (2015), 41-46. doi: 10.1145/2728732.2728738. Google Scholar
[18]	M. Hall, E. Frank, G. Holmes, B. Pfahringer, P. Reutemann and I.H. Witten, The WEKA data mining software: an update, ACM SIGKDD explorations newsletter, 11 (2009), 10-18. doi: 10.1145/1656274.1656278. Google Scholar
[19]	L. Hatton, The T-experiments: errors in scientific software, Quality of Numerical Software, (1997), 12-31. doi: 10.1007/978-1-5041-2940-4_2. Google Scholar
[20]	L. Hatton and A. Roberts, How accurate is scientific software?, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 20 (1994), 785-797. doi: 10.1109/32.328993. Google Scholar
[21]	M. R. Hestenes and E. Stiefel, Methods of Conjugate Gradients for Solving Linear Systems 1 Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards, 49. Google Scholar
[22]	E. Hüllermeier and J. Fürnkranz, Learning from label preferences, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Discovery Science, (2011), 2-17. Google Scholar
[23]	T. Joachims, Optimizing search engines using clickthrough data, Proceedings of the Eighth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, (2002), 133-142. doi: 10.1145/775047.775067. Google Scholar
[24]	T. Joachims, Training linear SVMs in linear time, Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, (2006), 217-226. doi: 10.1145/1150402.1150429. Google Scholar
[25]	D. Kelly and R. Sanders, The challenge of testing scientific software, In Proceedings of the 2008 Conference for the Association for Software Testing, (2008), 30-36. Google Scholar
[26]	M.G. Kendall, A new measure of rank correlation, Biometrika, 30 (1938), 81-93. doi: 10.1093/biomet/49.1-2.133. Google Scholar
[27]	S. Kullback and R.A. Leibler, On information and sufficiency, The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 22 (1951), 79-86. doi: 10.1214/aoms/1177729694. Google Scholar
[28]	T. Lu and C. Boutilier, Learning Mallows models with pairwise preferences, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-11), (2011), 145-152. Google Scholar
[29]	T. Lu and C. Boutilier, Robust approximation and incremental elicitation in voting protocols, Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (2011), 287-213. Google Scholar
[30]	R. D. Luce, Individual Choice Behavior: A Theoretical Analysis, Wiley, 1959. Google Scholar
[31]	C.L. Mallows, Non-null ranking models. I, Biometrika, 44 (1957), 114-130. doi: 10.1093/biomet/44.1-2.114. Google Scholar
[32]	N. Mattei and T. Walsh, Preflib: A library for preferences http://www.preflib.org, in Algorithmic Decision Theory, Springer, 2013, 259-270. Google Scholar
[33]	N. Matti, PrefLib-Tools: A small and lightweight set of Python tools for working with and generating data from www. PrefLib. org. , URL https://github.com/nmattei/PrefLib-Tools. Google Scholar
[34]	R. Rifkin and A. Klautau, In defense of one-vs-all classification, The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 5 (2004), 101-141. Google Scholar
[35]	B. Ripley and W. Venables, nnet: Feed-forward neural networks and multinomial log-linear models, R package version, 7. Google Scholar
[36]	P. Romanski, FSelector: Selecting attributes, Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Google Scholar
[37]	C. Spearman, 'Footrule' for measuring correlation, British Journal of Psychology, 1904-1920, (1906), 89-108. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1906.tb00174.x. Google Scholar
[38]	J.E. Stone, D. Gohara and G. Shi, OpenCL: A parallel programming standard for heterogeneous computing systems, Computing in Science & Engineering, 12 (2010), 66-73. doi: 10.1109/MCSE.2010.69. Google Scholar
[39]	R. C. Team, R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. 2013, ISBN 3-900051-07-0, 2014 Google Scholar
[40]	L. Xia and V. Conitzer, Determining Possible and Necessary Winners under Common Voting Rules Given Partial Orders., Proceedings of the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (2008), 196-201. Google Scholar

Figure 1. A graphical depiction of the data flow in Prefmine, with example input arguments. Rounded boxes denote algorithms, presented in full in the text. Cylinders show external data stores. Sharp squares denote immutable internal data stores, output by one of the system's algorithms. Ovals show the system's final output. Processing begins with the leftmost algorithm (the Dataset Loader), which downloads data from the Preflib repository, and then formats it as an immutable database. The immutable datasets are then passed to the middle algorithm (The Experimental Loop), which runs experiments on them according to its other input parameters, producing an immutable results database. The rightmost algorithm (The Analysis Toolkit) can be used to generate human readable and Latex-formatted tables by querying the results database. Queries are constructed from the input parameters. Existing valid parameter settings are discussed later in the text, but most parameter sets are easily extensible.

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Figure 2. The initial Prefmine window, from which users can launch a new experiment, or run the analysis toolkit

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Figure 3. The experiment configuration window in Prefmine, from which the user can configure input parameters for both the Dataset Loader and Experimental Loop portions of the system

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Figure 4. An example of an experiment configured using Prefmine's experiment configuration window. The experiment will run over the seven Debian datasets from the Preflib repository. Logistic Regression and a Worst Case Imputation approach will be applied to each problem instance, and the Copeland voting rule will be used to decide outcomes. Performance will be assessed under the Single Winner Error, First Error Location, and Kendall Correlation (τ) performance measures. 5 replications will be performed, and the output database will be stored in /tmp/, overwriting any existing results there. Since more than one dataset is being processed, the output filename parameter is ignored. The parameters below the output textbox ("Waiting...") are used to configure synthetic data generators or imputation methods that are not used, and so are ignored. Pressing the "Create" button will start the experiment

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Figure 5. An example of a Prefmine experiment in progress, using the settings from Figure 4. Note the progress bars showing the fraction of datsets processed (top) and runs completed on this dataset (bottom). The Textbox summarizes progress, including runtimes required to complete each dataset

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Figure 6. The Prefmine analysis window. The window is similar to the experiment window, but with a reduced set of options, and larger space to view the output

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Figure 7. The location of the dataset selection dropdown menu in Prefmine's experiment window

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Figure 8. The Imputation Method selection box in Prefmine's experiment window

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Figure 9. The Voting Rules selection box in Prefmine's experiment window

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Figure 10. The Performance Metric selection box in Prefmine's experiment window

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Figure 11. Empirical cumulative density functions for unique ballots in Dublin North and Dublin West. The x-axis shows the ranking of ballots from most to least common. The y-axis shows the cumulative proportion of voters who cast each ballot

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Table 1.

Algorithm 1 An algorithmic description of the Dataset Loader component of the Prefmine system. The Dataset Loader accepts a string corresponding to the name of a dataset, and then downloads the corresponding.soi file from the Preflib repository [32]. The file is then processed into an immutable Data instance which is produced as output.

procedure DatasetLoader(DatasetName)

Let $\text{url} \leftarrow$ lookupURL(DatasetName)

Let $S$ be a stream obtained by opening $\text{url}$.

Let $|C| \leftarrow$ S.nextLine()

Let CandMap = $\emptyset$

for i = 0; $ i < |C|$; i++ do

Let {key, name} = split(S.nextLine(), ", ")

Let CandMap[key] = name

end for

// The last line of the metadata contains the number of ballots.

Let $|B| \leftarrow$ split(S.nextLine(), ", ")[0]

Dataset output = $\emptyset$

While S.hasNextLine () do

//Each remaining line is parsed into a top order.

tokens $\leftarrow$ split(S.nextLine(), ", ")

numBallots $\leftarrow$ tokens[0]

Datum d = $\emptyset$

notAssigned = CandMap.keys()

for i=1; $i <$ |tokens|; i++ do

d[i] = tokens[i]

notAssigned $\setminus = $ tokens[i]

end for

for i= —tokens—; i¡ —C—; i++ do

d[i] = notAssigned

end for

for i = 0; i¡ numBallots; i++ do

output $\leftarrow$ append(output, d.duplicate())

end for

end while

return cast(Immutable Dataset) output

end procedure

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procedure DatasetLoader(DatasetName)

Let $\text{url} \leftarrow$ lookupURL(DatasetName)

Let $S$ be a stream obtained by opening $\text{url}$.

Let $|C| \leftarrow$ S.nextLine()

Let CandMap = $\emptyset$

for i = 0; $ i < |C|$; i++ do

Let {key, name} = split(S.nextLine(), ", ")

Let CandMap[key] = name

end for

// The last line of the metadata contains the number of ballots.

Let $|B| \leftarrow$ split(S.nextLine(), ", ")[0]

Dataset output = $\emptyset$

While S.hasNextLine () do

//Each remaining line is parsed into a top order.

tokens $\leftarrow$ split(S.nextLine(), ", ")

numBallots $\leftarrow$ tokens[0]

Datum d = $\emptyset$

notAssigned = CandMap.keys()

for i=1; $i <$ |tokens|; i++ do

d[i] = tokens[i]

notAssigned $\setminus = $ tokens[i]

end for

for i= —tokens—; i¡ —C—; i++ do

d[i] = notAssigned

end for

for i = 0; i¡ numBallots; i++ do

output $\leftarrow$ append(output, d.duplicate())

end for

end while

return cast(Immutable Dataset) output

end procedure

Table 2.

Algorithm 2 An algorithmic description of the Experimental Loop component of the Prefmine system. The Experimental Loop accepts an Immutable Dataset (produced using Algorithm 1), an ablation mode, a list of social choice algorithms (e.g. imputation-based, Minimax Regret), a list of voting rules (e.g. Borda, Copeland, a list of performance measures (e.g. Single Winner Error, First Error Location), and a number of repetitions for the experiment. For each repetition of the experiment, a new problem instance is generated using the specified ablation mode. Then every social choice algorithm is run under every voting rule to produce an outcome. The outcome is compared to the ground truth outcome for the voting rule under consideration using every performance measure. The results are written to an output database, which is rendered read-only as the final step

procedure ExperimentalLoop(ImmutableDatasets, AblationMode, ListOfSCAlgs, ListOfVotingRules, ListOfPrefMeasures, NumReps)

Let Output = $\emptyset$

for Rep = 0; Rep ¡ NumReps; Rep++ do

for all Dataset in ImmutableDatasets do

Let Problem = AblationMode(Dataset.copy())

for all Alg in ListOfSCAlgs do

for all Rule in ListOfVotingRules do

if Alg uses Imputation then

Outcome = Rule(Alg(Problem.expressedPrefs.copy()))

else

Outcome = Alg(Problem.expressedPrefs.copy(), Rule)

end if

CorrectOutcome = Rule(Problem.truePrefs)

for all Measure in ListOfPerfMeasures do

Key = concatenateNames(Dataset, Alg, Rule, Measure, Rep)

Output[Key] = Measure(Outcome, CorrectOutcome)

end for

return cast(Immutable) Output

end procedure

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procedure ExperimentalLoop(ImmutableDatasets, AblationMode, ListOfSCAlgs, ListOfVotingRules, ListOfPrefMeasures, NumReps)

Let Output = $\emptyset$

for Rep = 0; Rep ¡ NumReps; Rep++ do

for all Dataset in ImmutableDatasets do

Let Problem = AblationMode(Dataset.copy())

for all Alg in ListOfSCAlgs do

for all Rule in ListOfVotingRules do

if Alg uses Imputation then

Outcome = Rule(Alg(Problem.expressedPrefs.copy()))

else

Outcome = Alg(Problem.expressedPrefs.copy(), Rule)

end if

CorrectOutcome = Rule(Problem.truePrefs)

for all Measure in ListOfPerfMeasures do

Key = concatenateNames(Dataset, Alg, Rule, Measure, Rep)

Output[Key] = Measure(Outcome, CorrectOutcome)

end for

return cast(Immutable) Output

end procedure

Table 3.

Algorithm 3 An algorithmic description of the Analysis Toolkit component of the Prefmine system. The Analysis Toolkit accepts an output database produced by the Experimental Loop component of the system (Algorithm 2). The user also specifies a particular social choice algorithm and voting rule, as well as a list of datasets and performance measures. The toolkit computes a table where each row corresponds to a dataset, and each column to a performance measure. The value in a particular table cell will be the mean and standard deviation of the selected social choice algorithm under the selected voting rule, with respect to the corresponding performance measure (i.e. column) and dataset (i.e. row). The resulting table is then output both in a human readable format and as a Latex tabular environment.

procedure AnalysisToolkit(OutputDatabase, SCAlg, VotingRule, ListOfPrefMeasures, ListOfDatasets)

Let Table = $\emptyset$

for all Dataset in ListOfDatasets do

for all Measure in ListOfPerfMeasures do

Key = concatenateNames(Dataset, SCAlg, VotingRule, Measure, *)

Results = OutputDatabase[key]

Mean = computeMean(Results)

Stdev = computerStandardDeviation(Results)

Table[Dataset][Measure][\mean"] = Mean

Table[Dataset][Measure][\stdev"] = Stdev

end for

Print(Table)

PrintLatex(Table)

end procedure

Table Options

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procedure AnalysisToolkit(OutputDatabase, SCAlg, VotingRule, ListOfPrefMeasures, ListOfDatasets)

Let Table = $\emptyset$

for all Dataset in ListOfDatasets do

for all Measure in ListOfPerfMeasures do

Key = concatenateNames(Dataset, SCAlg, VotingRule, Measure, *)

Results = OutputDatabase[key]

Mean = computeMean(Results)

Stdev = computerStandardDeviation(Results)

Table[Dataset][Measure][\mean"] = Mean

Table[Dataset][Measure][\stdev"] = Stdev

end for

Print(Table)

PrintLatex(Table)

end procedure

Table 1. Table showing the mean firstError, singleWinner, and tau measures for the instantiation of the imputation-based approach using logistic regression on the Copeland social choice function. Reported values are the mean over many problem instances, and reported measurement errors are the sample standard deviations. The rightmost columns report the number of candidates, and the percentage of missing information in each set

	First Error	Single Winner	$\tau$	—C—	% Missing
Debian 2002	$ 4.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	4	11.9
Debian 2003	$ 4.94 \pm 0.49 $	$ 0.01 \pm 0.12 $	$ 0.99 \pm 0.07 $	5	13.6
Debian 2005	$ 7.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	7	15.5
Debian 2006	$ 6.35 \pm 0.76 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.94 \pm 0.03 $	8	14.8
Debian 2007	$ 9.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.90 \pm 0.08 $	9	19.1
Debian 2010	$ 5.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	5	11.0
Debian 2012	$ 4.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	4	13.2
Debian Logo	$ 5.18 \pm 1.36 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.75 \pm 0.11 $	8	40.0
Dublin North	$ 4.01 \pm 0.07 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.85 \pm 0.01 $	12	58.5
Dublin West	$ 3.85 \pm 1.88 $	$ 0.82 \pm 0.38 $	$ 0.81 \pm 0.06 $	9	50.8
Meath	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 3.54 \pm 0.32 $	$ 0.74 \pm 0.02 $	14	66.8

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	First Error	Single Winner	$\tau$	—C—	% Missing
Debian 2002	$ 4.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	4	11.9
Debian 2003	$ 4.94 \pm 0.49 $	$ 0.01 \pm 0.12 $	$ 0.99 \pm 0.07 $	5	13.6
Debian 2005	$ 7.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	7	15.5
Debian 2006	$ 6.35 \pm 0.76 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.94 \pm 0.03 $	8	14.8
Debian 2007	$ 9.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.90 \pm 0.08 $	9	19.1
Debian 2010	$ 5.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	5	11.0
Debian 2012	$ 4.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	4	13.2
Debian Logo	$ 5.18 \pm 1.36 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.75 \pm 0.11 $	8	40.0
Dublin North	$ 4.01 \pm 0.07 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.85 \pm 0.01 $	12	58.5
Dublin West	$ 3.85 \pm 1.88 $	$ 0.82 \pm 0.38 $	$ 0.81 \pm 0.06 $	9	50.8
Meath	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 3.54 \pm 0.32 $	$ 0.74 \pm 0.02 $	14	66.8

Table 2. Table showing the mean firstError, singleWinner, and tau measures for the Minimax Regret approach on the Copeland social choice function. Reported values are the mean over many problem instances, and reported measurement errors are the sample standard deviations. The rightmost columns report the number of candidates, and the percentage of missing information in each set

	First Error	Single Winner	$\tau$	—C—	% Missing
Debian 2002	$ 4.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	4	11.9
Debian 2003	$ 4.40 \pm 0.84 $	$ 0.02 \pm 0.09 $	$ 0.90 \pm 0.11 $	5	13.6
Debian 2005	$ 6.57 \pm 1.54 $	$ 0.04 \pm 0.13 $	$ 0.99 \pm 0.02 $	7	15.5
Debian 2006	$ 6.00 \pm 0.10 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.93 \pm 0.00 $	8	14.8
Debian 2007	$ 2.05 \pm 0.37 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.87 \pm 0.03 $	9	19.1
Debian 2010	$ 3.04 \pm 1.39 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.82 \pm 0.14 $	5	11.0
Debian 2012	$ 4.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	4	13.2
Debian Logo	$ 5.44 \pm 1.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.74 \pm 0.12 $	8	40.0
Dublin North	$ 3.98 \pm 0.14 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ -0.09 \pm 0.03 $	12	58.5
Dublin West	$ 3.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.72 \pm 0.13 $	$ 0.52 \pm 0.05 $	9	50.8
Meath	$ 2.97 \pm 0.17 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ -0.46 \pm 0.04 $	14	66.8

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	First Error	Single Winner	$\tau$	—C—	% Missing
Debian 2002	$ 4.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	4	11.9
Debian 2003	$ 4.40 \pm 0.84 $	$ 0.02 \pm 0.09 $	$ 0.90 \pm 0.11 $	5	13.6
Debian 2005	$ 6.57 \pm 1.54 $	$ 0.04 \pm 0.13 $	$ 0.99 \pm 0.02 $	7	15.5
Debian 2006	$ 6.00 \pm 0.10 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.93 \pm 0.00 $	8	14.8
Debian 2007	$ 2.05 \pm 0.37 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.87 \pm 0.03 $	9	19.1
Debian 2010	$ 3.04 \pm 1.39 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.82 \pm 0.14 $	5	11.0
Debian 2012	$ 4.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 1.00 \pm 0.00 $	4	13.2
Debian Logo	$ 5.44 \pm 1.00 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.74 \pm 0.12 $	8	40.0
Dublin North	$ 3.98 \pm 0.14 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ -0.09 \pm 0.03 $	12	58.5
Dublin West	$ 3.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ 0.72 \pm 0.13 $	$ 0.52 \pm 0.05 $	9	50.8
Meath	$ 2.97 \pm 0.17 $	$ 0.00 \pm 0.00 $	$ -0.46 \pm 0.04 $	14	66.8

Table 3. A summary of the results from the preliminary experiment comparing feature selection methods and classifiers for use with the imputation based approach to resolving social choice with incomplete information. Performance is reported under the Borda Error measure, which is related to the classifier's accuracy in imputing ballots. Performance which is statistically indistinguishable from the best on any given dataset has been rendered in bold

	SVM			NB			MN
	PCA	IG	plain	PCA	IG	plain	PCA	IG	plain
Deb. 2002	0.008	0.007	0.008	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003
Deb. 2003	0.009	0.005	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009
Deb. 2005	0.014	0.013	0.016	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031
Deb. 2006	0.013	0.013	0.015	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031
Deb. 2007	0.033	0.031	0.033	0.043	0.043	0.043	0.043	0.043	0.043
Deb. 2010	0.004	0.004	0.004	0.005	0.005	0.005	0.005	0.005	0.005
Deb. 2012	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003
Deb. Logo	0.006	0.008	0.006	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011
North	1.084	0.923	1.08	1.546	1.546	1.546	1.546	1.546	1.546
West	0.549	0.458	0.575	0.654	0.654	0.654	0.654	0.654	0.654

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	SVM			NB			MN
	PCA	IG	plain	PCA	IG	plain	PCA	IG	plain
Deb. 2002	0.008	0.007	0.008	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003
Deb. 2003	0.009	0.005	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009
Deb. 2005	0.014	0.013	0.016	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031
Deb. 2006	0.013	0.013	0.015	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031
Deb. 2007	0.033	0.031	0.033	0.043	0.043	0.043	0.043	0.043	0.043
Deb. 2010	0.004	0.004	0.004	0.005	0.005	0.005	0.005	0.005	0.005
Deb. 2012	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.003
Deb. Logo	0.006	0.008	0.006	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011
North	1.084	0.923	1.08	1.546	1.546	1.546	1.546	1.546	1.546
West	0.549	0.458	0.575	0.654	0.654	0.654	0.654	0.654	0.654

Table 4. A summary of the results from the preliminary experiment comparing feature selection methods and classifiers for use with the imputation based approach to resolving social choice with incomplete information. Performance is reported under the Bias measure, which is the correlation between the classifier's error in imputing a given candidate and the popularity of that candidate. Performance which is statistically indistinguishable from the best on any given dataset has been rendered in bold

	SVM			NB			MN
	PCA	IG	plain	PCA	IG	plain	PCA	IG	plain
Deb. 2002	0.151	0.155	0.159	0.109	0.109	0.109	0.109	0.109	0.109
Deb. 2003	0.088	0.030	0.051	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009
Deb. 2005	0.255	0.182	0.309	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031
Deb. 2006	0.171	0.040	0.203	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011
Deb. 2007	0.280	0.170	0.296	0.065	0.065	0.065	0.065	0.065	0.065
Deb. 2010	0.078	0.162	0.064	0.099	0.099	0.099	0.099	0.099	0.099
Deb. 2012	0.34	0.35	0.32	0.12	0.12	0.12	0.12	0.12	0.12
Deb. Logo	0.056	0.034	0.026	0.007	0.007	0.007	0.007	0.007	0.007
North	0.331	0.323	0.322	0.391	0.391	0.391	0.391	0.391	0.391
West	0.020	0.101	0.026	0.041	0.041	0.041	0.041	0.041	0.041

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	SVM			NB			MN
	PCA	IG	plain	PCA	IG	plain	PCA	IG	plain
Deb. 2002	0.151	0.155	0.159	0.109	0.109	0.109	0.109	0.109	0.109
Deb. 2003	0.088	0.030	0.051	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009	0.009
Deb. 2005	0.255	0.182	0.309	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031	0.031
Deb. 2006	0.171	0.040	0.203	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011	0.011
Deb. 2007	0.280	0.170	0.296	0.065	0.065	0.065	0.065	0.065	0.065
Deb. 2010	0.078	0.162	0.064	0.099	0.099	0.099	0.099	0.099	0.099
Deb. 2012	0.34	0.35	0.32	0.12	0.12	0.12	0.12	0.12	0.12
Deb. Logo	0.056	0.034	0.026	0.007	0.007	0.007	0.007	0.007	0.007
North	0.331	0.323	0.322	0.391	0.391	0.391	0.391	0.391	0.391
West	0.020	0.101	0.026	0.041	0.041	0.041	0.041	0.041	0.041

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A testbed to enable comparisons between competing approaches for computational social choice

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A testbed to enable comparisons between competing approaches for computational social choice

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