In this paper, we give a simple characterization of a set of popular matchings defined by preference lists with ties. By employing our characterization, we propose a polynomial time algorithm for finding a minimum cost popular matching.
For a set A of n applicants and a set I of m items, we consider a problem of computing a matching of applicants to items, i.e., a function M mapping A to I; here we assume that each applicant $x in A$ provides a preference list on items in I. We say
that an applicant $x in A$ prefers an item p than an item q if p is located at a higher position than q in its preference list, and we say that x prefers a matching M over a matching M if x prefers M(x) over M(x). For a given matching problem A, I, and preference lists, we say that M is more popular than M if the number of applicants preferring M over M is larger than that of applicants preferring M over M, and M is called a popular matching if there is no other matching that is more popular than M. Here we consider the situation that A is partitioned into $A_{1},A_{2},...,A_{k}$, and that each $A_{i}$ is assigned a weight $w_{i}>0$ such that w_{1}>w_{2}>...>w_{k}>0$. For such a matching problem, we say that M is more popular than M if the total weight of applicants preferring M over M is larger than that of applicants preferring M over M, and we call M an k-weighted popular matching if there is no other matching that is more popular than M. In this paper, we analyze the 2-weighted matching problem, and we show that (lower bound) if $m/n^{4/3}=o(1)$, then a random instance of the 2-weighted matching problem with $w_{1} geq 2w_{2}$ has a 2-weighted popular matching with probability o(1); and (upper bound) if $n^{4/3}/m = o(1)$, then a random instance of the 2-weighted matching problem with $w_{1} geq 2w_{2}$ has a 2-weighted popular matching with probability 1-o(1).
For a set $A$ of $n$ people and a set $B$ of $m$ items, with each person having a preference list that ranks all items from most wanted to least wanted, we consider the problem of matching every person with a unique item. A matching $M$ is called $ep
silon$-popular if for any other matching $M$, the number of people who prefer $M$ to $M$ is at most $epsilon n$ plus the number of those who prefer $M$ to $M$. In 2006, Mahdian showed that when randomly generating peoples preference lists, if $m/n > 1.42$, then a 0-popular matching exists with $1-o(1)$ probability; and if $m/n < 1.42$, then a 0-popular matching exists with $o(1)$ probability. The ratio 1.42 can be viewed as a transition point, at which the probability rises from asymptotically zero to asymptotically one, for the case $epsilon=0$. In this paper, we introduce an upper bound and a lower bound of the transition point in more general cases. In particular, we show that when randomly generating each persons preference list, if $alpha(1-e^{-1/alpha}) > 1-epsilon$, then an $epsilon$-popular matching exists with $1-o(1)$ probability (upper bound); and if $alpha(1-e^{-(1+e^{1/alpha})/alpha}) < 1-2epsilon$, then an $epsilon$-popular matching exists with $o(1)$ probability (lower bound).
Given a set of attributed subgraphs known to be from different classes, how can we discover their differences? There are many cases where collections of subgraphs may be contrasted against each other. For example, they may be assigned ground truth la
bels (spam/not-spam), or it may be desired to directly compare the biological networks of different species or compound networks of different chemicals. In this work we introduce the problem of characterizing the differences between attributed subgraphs that belong to different classes. We define this characterization problem as one of partitioning the attributes into as many groups as the number of classes, while maximizing the total attributed quality score of all the given subgraphs. We show that our attribute-to-class assignment problem is NP-hard and an optimal $(1 - 1/e)$-approximation algorithm exists. We also propose two different faster heuristics that are linear-time in the number of attributes and subgraphs. Unlike previous work where only attributes were taken into account for characterization, here we exploit both attributes and social ties (i.e. graph structure). Through extensive experiments, we compare our proposed algorithms, show findings that agree with human intuition on datasets from Amazon co-purchases, Congressional bill sponsorships, and DBLP co-authorships. We also show that our approach of characterizing subgraphs is better suited for sense-making than discriminating classification approaches.
We consider the problem of computing a matching in a bipartite graph in the presence of one-sided preferences. There are several well studied notions of optimality which include pareto optimality, rank maximality, fairness and popularity. In this pap
er, we conduct an in-depth experimental study comparing different notions of optimality based on a variety of metrics like cardinality, number of rank-1 edges, popularity, to name a few. Observing certain shortcomings in the standard notions of optimality, we propose an algorithm which maximizes an alternative metric called the Area under Profile Curve ratio (AUPCR). To the best of our knowledge, the AUPCR metric was used earlier but there is no known algorithm to compute an AUPCR maximizing matching. Finally, we illustrate the superiority of the AUPCR-maximizing matching by comparing its performance against other optimal matchings on synthetic instances modeling real-world data.
Let $G$ be a digraph where every node has preferences over its incoming edges. The preferences of a node extend naturally to preferences over branchings, i.e., directed forests; a branching $B$ is popular if $B$ does not lose a head-to-head election
(where nodes cast votes) against any branching. Such popular branchings have a natural application in liquid democracy. The popular branching problem is to decide if $G$ admits a popular branching or not. We give a characterization of popular branchings in terms of dual certificates and use this characterization to design an efficient combinatorial algorithm for the popular branching problem. When preferences are weak rankings, we use our characterization to formulate the popular branching polytope in the original space and also show that our algorithm can be modified to compute a branching with least unpopularity margin. When preferences are strict rankings, we show that approximately popular branchings always exist.