Complexity Results for Preference Aggregation over (m)CP-nets: Pareto and Majority Voting

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed complexity analysis of global voting methods over (m)CP-nets, revealing new bounds and filling gaps in understanding preference aggregation without the $ ext{O}$-legality restriction.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive complexity classification of Pareto and majority global voting over non-$ ext{O}$-legal (m)CP-nets, including tight bounds and polynomial hierarchy results.

Findings

Many problems are in the polynomial hierarchy.

Some problems are in PTIME or LOGSPACE.

Previously, most were only known to be in EXPTIME.

Abstract

Combinatorial preference aggregation has many applications in AI. Given the exponential nature of these preferences, compact representations are needed and ($m$)CP-nets are among the most studied ones. Sequential and global voting are two ways to aggregate preferences over CP-nets. In the former, preferences are aggregated feature-by-feature. Hence, when preferences have specific feature dependencies, sequential voting may exhibit voting paradoxes, i.e., it might select sub-optimal outcomes. To avoid paradoxes in sequential voting, one has often assumed the $\mathcal{O}$-legality restriction, which imposes a shared topological order among all the CP-nets. On the contrary, in global voting, CP-nets are considered as a whole during preference aggregation. For this reason, global voting is immune from paradoxes, and there is no need to impose restrictions over the CP-nets' topological structure. Sequential voting over $\mathcal{O}$-legal CP-nets has extensively been investigated. On the other hand, global voting over non-$\mathcal{O}$-legal CP-nets has not carefully been analyzed, despite it was stated in the literature that a theoretical comparison between global and sequential voting was promising and a precise complexity analysis for global voting has been asked for multiple times. In quite few works, very partial results on the complexity of global voting over CP-nets have been given. We start to fill this gap by carrying out a thorough complexity analysis of Pareto and majority global voting over not necessarily $\mathcal{O}$-legal acyclic binary polynomially connected (m)CP-nets. We settle these problems in the polynomial hierarchy, and some of them in PTIME or LOGSPACE, whereas EXPTIME was the previously known upper bound for most of them. We show various tight lower bounds and matching upper bounds for problems that up to date did not have any explicit non-obvious lower bound.