[EM] Integer program for River clustering
Kristofer Munsterhjelm
km_elmet at t-online.de
Sat Feb 15 11:20:57 PST 2014
And here, to show that it can be done, is a mixed integer linear program
for clustering using River. River turns out to be easier to implement in
this way than Tideman is, and River enjoys properties that Tideman
doesn't, so I get two birds with one stone.
However, it's completely impractical for large councils. My computer and
GLPK solver manages three or four seats in less than a few minutes, but
then the time goes up by *a lot*.
It might be possible to use these methods in a semi-sequential manner:
do three seats at a time (four clusters, where the last cluster just
contains voters not assigned to any of the other clusters, not
representing any winners so far). Determine the three winners, then
remove the voters that have been assigned to any of those clusters.
Repeat for the next three clusters with the candidates that have already
been assigned disallowed (unless this is party list), and repeat until
all the winners have been determined.
However, due to only considering three "active" clusters at a time, such
a method might not be quite as proportional as desired. The minimax
integer program might be more desirable, since it can get up to ten or
fifteen seats before unacceptably slowing down. Minimax not being
cloneproof may end up being an acceptable cost for being able to do more
seats at once. I wouldn't know, but it's worth thinking about.
Also, these clustering methods are in the spirit of least remainder
methods (since they have absolute quota constraints). As I mentioned
earlier, the "spirit of Sainte-Laguë" would be more to accurately
represent (more fair than random) something... but I'm not sure what
that something would be. Accurately represent a random pick from all
clusters? I don't know.
I've attached two copies. They differ in what examples they use; both
are taken from Steven Eppley's page about independence of
Pareto-dominated alternatives,
http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~seppley/Independence%20from%20Pareto-dominated%20Alternatives.htm
.
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