[EM] Venzke's election simulations

[Warren Smith]

comments by WDS

1. I think using utility=-distance
is not as realistic as something like
utility=1/sqrt(1+distance^2)

I claim the latter is more realistic both near 0 distance and near
infinite distance.

2. It has been argued that L2 distance may not be as realistic as L1 distance.
L2=euclidean
L1=taxicab

3. Your "candidates bolted in place" (in locations selected manually)
at some point needs to be replaced by an outer loop which chooses
their locations from some distribution, and finds average bayesian
regret over all candidate locations.
If I manually choose locations, I can probably make nearly any method look like
"the best" or "worst" method...   that is kind of anecdotal evidence
versus real evidence.
(Not that the anecdotes are uninteresting.)

4. your results look interesting but I do not know what a lot of your
voting methods are, e.g. QR, VFA, SPST, C//A, etc.  Too abbreviated.
Need to supply a key.

5. some conclusions, like RangeNS is better than IRV and IRV-tr and C//A, look
fairly solid (happen in all your sims*); others, like Bucklin is
better than RangeNS,
look inconclusive (happen in some of your sims, but reverse happens in
other sims)

*There was one exception, but it had very small regret for all methods
other than MMPO and ApprZIS.


-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)
and
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html