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The Surprising Effectiveness of SP Voting with Partial Preferences

Hosseini, Hadi, Mandal, Debmalya, Puhan, Amrit

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We consider the problem of recovering the ground truth ordering (ranking, top-$k$, or others) over a large number of alternatives. The wisdom of crowd is a heuristic approach based on Condorcet's Jury theorem to address this problem through collective opinions. This approach fails to recover the ground truth when the majority of the crowd is misinformed. The surprisingly popular (SP) algorithm cite{prelec2017solution} is an alternative approach that is able to recover the ground truth even when experts are in minority. The SP algorithm requires the voters to predict other voters' report in the form of a full probability distribution over all rankings of alternatives. However, when the number of alternatives, $m$, is large, eliciting the prediction report or even the vote over $m$ alternatives might be too costly. In this paper, we design a scalable alternative of the SP algorithm which only requires eliciting partial preferences from the voters, and propose new variants of the SP algorithm. In particular, we propose two versions -- Aggregated-SP and Partial-SP -- that ask voters to report vote and prediction on a subset of size $k$ ($\ll m$) in terms of top alternative, partial rank, or an approval set. Through a large-scale crowdsourcing experiment on MTurk, we show that both of our approaches outperform conventional preference aggregation algorithms for the recovery of ground truth rankings, when measured in terms of Kendall-Tau distance and Spearman's $\rho$. We further analyze the collected data and demonstrate that voters' behavior in the experiment, including the minority of the experts, and the SP phenomenon, can be correctly simulated by a concentric mixtures of Mallows model. Finally, we provide theoretical bounds on the sample complexity of SP algorithms with partial rankings to demonstrate the theoretical guarantees of the proposed methods.


Surprisingly Popular Voting Recovers Rankings, Surprisingly!

Hosseini, Hadi, Mandal, Debmalya, Shah, Nisarg, Shi, Kevin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The wisdom of the crowd has long become the de facto approach for eliciting information from individuals or experts in order to predict the ground truth. However, classical democratic approaches for aggregating individual \emph{votes} only work when the opinion of the majority of the crowd is relatively accurate. A clever recent approach, \emph{surprisingly popular voting}, elicits additional information from the individuals, namely their \emph{prediction} of other individuals' votes, and provably recovers the ground truth even when experts are in minority. This approach works well when the goal is to pick the correct option from a small list, but when the goal is to recover a true ranking of the alternatives, a direct application of the approach requires eliciting too much information. We explore practical techniques for extending the surprisingly popular algorithm to ranked voting by partial votes and predictions and designing robust aggregation rules. We experimentally demonstrate that even a little prediction information helps surprisingly popular voting outperform classical approaches.