scholarly journals Preferences Single-Peaked on a Tree: Multiwinner Elections and Structural Results

2022 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 231-276
Author(s):  
Dominik Peters ◽  
Lan Yu ◽  
Hau Chan ◽  
Edith Elkind

A preference profile is single-peaked on a tree if the candidate set can be equipped with a tree structure so that the preferences of each voter are decreasing from their top candidate along all paths in the tree. This notion was introduced by Demange (1982), and subsequently Trick (1989b) described an efficient algorithm for deciding if a given profile is single-peaked on a tree. We study the complexity of multiwinner elections under several variants of the Chamberlin–Courant rule for preferences single-peaked on trees. We show that in this setting the egalitarian version of this rule admits a polynomial-time winner determination algorithm. For the utilitarian version, we prove that winner determination remains NP-hard for the Borda scoring function; indeed, this hardness results extends to a large family of scoring functions. However, a winning committee can be found in polynomial time if either the number of leaves or the number of internal vertices of the underlying tree is bounded by a constant. To benefit from these positive results, we need a procedure that can determine whether a given profile is single-peaked on a tree that has additional desirable properties (such as, e.g., a small number of leaves). To address this challenge, we develop a structural approach that enables us to compactly represent all trees with respect to which a given profile is single-peaked. We show how to use this representation to efficiently find the best tree for a given profile for use with our winner determination algorithms: Given a profile, we can efficiently find a tree with the minimum number of leaves, or a tree with the minimum number of internal vertices among trees on which the profile is single-peaked. We then explore the power and limitations of this framework: we develop polynomial-time algorithms to find trees with the smallest maximum degree, diameter, or pathwidth, but show that it is NP-hard to check whether a given profile is single-peaked on a tree that is isomorphic to a given tree, or on a regular tree.

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 475-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Betzler ◽  
A. Slinko ◽  
J. Uhlmann

We investigate two systems of fully proportional representation suggested by Chamberlin Courant and Monroe. Both systems assign a representative to each voter so that the "sum of misrepresentations" is minimized. The winner determination problem for both systems is known to be NP-hard, hence this work aims at investigating whether there are variants of the proposed rules and/or specific electorates for which these problems can be solved efficiently. As a variation of these rules, instead of minimizing the sum of misrepresentations, we considered minimizing the maximal misrepresentation introducing effectively two new rules. In the general case these "minimax" versions of classical rules appeared to be still NP-hard. We investigated the parameterized complexity of winner determination of the two classical and two new rules with respect to several parameters. Here we have a mixture of positive and negative results: e.g., we proved fixed-parameter tractability for the parameter the number of candidates but fixed-parameter intractability for the number of winners. For single-peaked electorates our results are overwhelmingly positive: we provide polynomial-time algorithms for most of the considered problems. The only rule that remains NP-hard for single-peaked electorates is the classical Monroe rule.


2014 ◽  
Vol Vol. 16 no. 3 (Analysis of Algorithms) ◽  
Author(s):  
Uéverton dos Santos Souza ◽  
Fábio Protti ◽  
Maise Silva

Analysis of Algorithms International audience Flood-it is a combinatorial game played on a colored graph G whose aim is to make the graph monochromatic using the minimum number of flooding moves, relatively to a fixed pivot. Free-Flood-it is a variant where the pivot can be freely chosen for each move of the game. The standard versions of Flood-it and Free-Flood-it are played on m ×n grids. In this paper we analyze the behavior of these games when played on other classes of graphs, such as d-boards, powers of cycles and circular grids. We describe polynomial time algorithms to play Flood-it on C2n (the second power of a cycle on n vertices), 2 ×n circular grids, and some types of d-boards (grids with a monochromatic column). We also show that Free-Flood-it is NP-hard on C2n and 2 ×n circular grids.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Furmańczyk ◽  
Andrzej Jastrzębski ◽  
Marek Kubale

AbstractIn many applications in sequencing and scheduling it is desirable to have an underlaying graph as equitably colored as possible. In this paper we survey recent theoretical results concerning conditions for equitable colorability of some graphs and recent theoretical results concerning the complexity of equitable coloring problem. Next, since the general coloring problem is strongly NP-hard, we report on practical experiments with some efficient polynomial-time algorithms for approximate equitable coloring of general graphs.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (03) ◽  
pp. 225-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID KIRKPATRICK ◽  
BOTING YANG ◽  
SANDRA ZILLES

Given an arrangement A of n sensors and two points s and t in the plane, the barrier resilience of A with respect to s and t is the minimum number of sensors whose removal permits a path from s to t such that the path does not intersect the coverage region of any sensor in A. When the surveillance domain is the entire plane and sensor coverage regions are unit line segments, even with restricted orientations, the problem of determining the barrier resilience is known to be NP-hard. On the other hand, if sensor coverage regions are arbitrary lines, the problem has a trivial linear time solution. In this paper, we study the case where each sensor coverage region is an arbitrary ray, and give an O(n2m) time algorithm for computing the barrier resilience when there are m ⩾ 1 sensor intersections.


Author(s):  
P. Renjith ◽  
N. Sadagopan

For an optimization problem known to be NP-Hard, the dichotomy study investigates the reduction instances to determine the line separating polynomial-time solvable vs NP-Hard instances (easy vs hard instances). In this paper, we investigate the well-studied Hamiltonian cycle problem (HCYCLE), and present an interesting dichotomy result on split graphs. T. Akiyama et al. (1980) have shown that HCYCLE is NP-complete on planar bipartite graphs with maximum degree [Formula: see text]. We use this result to show that HCYCLE is NP-complete for [Formula: see text]-free split graphs. Further, we present polynomial-time algorithms for Hamiltonian cycle in [Formula: see text]-free and [Formula: see text]-free split graphs. We believe that the structural results presented in this paper can be used to show similar dichotomy result for Hamiltonian path problem and other variants of Hamiltonian cycle (path) problems.


Algorithmica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksander Kędzierski ◽  
Jakub Radoszewski

AbstractQuasiperiodicity in strings was introduced almost 30 years ago as an extension of string periodicity. The basic notions of quasiperiodicity are cover and seed. A cover of a text T is a string whose occurrences in T cover all positions of T. A seed of text T is a cover of a superstring of T. In various applications exact quasiperiodicity is still not sufficient due to the presence of errors. We consider approximate notions of quasiperiodicity, for which we allow approximate occurrences in T with a small Hamming, Levenshtein or weighted edit distance. In previous work Sim et al. (J Korea Inf Sci Soc 29(1):16–21, 2002) and Christodoulakis et al. (J Autom Lang Comb 10(5/6), 609–626, 2005) showed that computing approximate covers and seeds, respectively, under weighted edit distance is NP-hard. They, therefore, considered restricted approximate covers and seeds which need to be factors of the original string T and presented polynomial-time algorithms for computing them. Further algorithms, considering approximate occurrences with Hamming distance bounded by k, were given in several contributions by Guth et al. They also studied relaxed approximate quasiperiods. We present more efficient algorithms for computing restricted approximate covers and seeds. In particular, we improve upon the complexities of many of the aforementioned algorithms, also for relaxed quasiperiods. Our solutions are especially efficient if the number (or total cost) of allowed errors is small. We also show conditional lower bounds for computing restricted approximate covers and prove NP-hardness of computing non-restricted approximate covers and seeds under the Hamming distance.


Author(s):  
Philimon Nyamugure ◽  
Elias Munapo ◽  
‘Maseka Lesaoana ◽  
Santosh Kumar

While most linear programming (LP) problems can be solved in polynomial time, pure and mixed integer problems are NP-hard and there are no known polynomial time algorithms to solve these problems. A characteristic equation (CE) was developed to solve a pure integer program (PIP). This paper presents a heuristic that generates a feasible solution along with the bounds for the NP-hard mixed integer program (MIP) model by solving the LP relaxation and the PIP, using the CE.


2015 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 439-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Brandt ◽  
Markus Brill ◽  
Edith Hemaspaandra ◽  
Lane A. Hemaspaandra

For many election systems, bribery (and related) attacks have been shown NP-hard using constructions on combinatorially rich structures such as partitions and covers. This paper shows that for voters who follow the most central political-science model of electorates---single-peaked preferences---those hardness protections vanish. By using single-peaked preferences to simplify combinatorial covering challenges, we for the first time show that NP-hard bribery problems---including those for Kemeny and Llull elections---fall to polynomial time for single-peaked electorates. By using single-peaked preferences to simplify combinatorial partition challenges, we for the first time show that NP-hard partition-of-voters problems fall to polynomial time for single-peaked electorates. We show that for single-peaked electorates, the winner problems for Dodgson and Kemeny elections, though Theta-two-complete in the general case, fall to polynomial time. And we completely classify the complexity of weighted coalition manipulation for scoring protocols in single-peaked electorates.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna F Ziegel ◽  
Fabian Krüger ◽  
Alexander Jordan ◽  
Fernando Fasciati

Abstract Motivated by the Basel III regulations, recent studies have considered joint forecasts of Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall. A large family of scoring functions can be used to evaluate forecast performance in this context. However, little intuitive or empirical guidance is currently available, which renders the choice of scoring function awkward in practice. We therefore develop graphical checks of whether one forecast method dominates another under a relevant class of scoring functions, and propose an associated hypothesis test. We illustrate these tools with simulation examples and an empirical analysis of S&P 500 and DAX returns.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Abra Brisbin ◽  
Manda Riehl ◽  
Noah Williams

Abstract Permutations are frequently used in solving the genome rearrangement problem, whose goal is finding the shortest sequence of mutations transforming one genome into another. We introduce the Deletion-Insertion model (DI) to model small-scale mutations in species with linear chromosomes, such as humans. Applying one restriction to this model, we obtain the transposition model for genome rearrangement, which was shown to be NP-hard in [4]. We use combinatorial reasoning and permutation statistics to develop a polynomial-time algorithm to approximate the minimum number of transpositions required in the transposition model and to analyze the sharpness of several bounds on transpositions between genomes.


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