[EM] Voter satisfaction measure in a general case?

[Magosányi Árpád]

Thanks for the good inputs.I try to summarize here

proposed methods:

- set up some kind of utility generator that produces ratings style votes,
and then randomly sample elections from this utility generator.
- use previous rated votes similarly to the utility generator above
- ask for ratings

I also thought about asking about perceived closeness of alternatives

The reason for asking was to figure out a way to show voter satisfaction
measure with vote results, in a general voting application.
Directions towards solutions I see:
- utility generators and previous similar votes seems to be too complex for
the task
- optionally asking rates from voters (maybe asking them to put the choices
on a two-dimensional field, along with their own position) and use that as
the basis of the utility function is an interesting idea maybe worth
exploring
- leaving the choice of an appropriate utility function form to the user
when voter satisfaction is measured is the easiest


2017-10-16 12:47 GMT+02:00 Juho Laatu <juho.laatu at gmail.com>:

> > On 15 Oct 2017, at 22:23, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/15/2017 07:23 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:
> >> I think you can't really have any good rating style satisfaction
> >> measures in methods that measure rankings only.
> >
> > The only thing I can think of, statistically speaking, is to set up some
> kind of utility generator that produces ratings style votes, and then
> randomly sample elections from this utility generator. Throw away every
> sample that doesn't have the same ranked reduction as the actual data you
> have, and then calculate the mean utility for each candidate across the
> samples that remain.
>
> Makes sense. That way you can get a guesstimate on what the rated opinions
> might have been. In this method you probably assume some level of even
> distribution of candidates in the sense that if votes are 50:A>B>C,
> 50:C>B>A, the algorithm assumes that B has equal distance to both A and C.
> Also vote normalisation will be assumed.
>
> >
> > In other words, if you have an election that is
> >
> > 3: A>B>C
> > 2: B>C>A
> > 1: C>A>B
> >
> > (say)
> >
> > then you run your utility generator and save every generated scenario
> where:
> >
> > 3 voters rate A higher than B and both higher than C
> > 2 other voters rate B higher than C and both of those above A
> > 1 other voter rate C higher than A and both of those above B
> > there are no other voters
> >
> > and then you take the mean utility for A, B, and C across all those
> generated scenarios.
> >
> > In practice, this method becomes completely impractical whenever the
> number of voters is greater than say, 10 or so. It might be possible to use
> statistical cleverness to speed up the sampling, but it would probably take
> a long time to find out just how to be clever in such a way.
>
> Maybe you could use also samples that are close enough to the actual vote
> set (with some weight that decreases when the distance to actual votes
> grows).
>
> >
> > It would not be an established method. The utility generator would also
> have tunable parameters (spatial model? how many dimensions? degree of
> correlation, etc), and those would have to be set depending on the
> political context. Introducing noise (n voters vote however they want)
> would also make it significantly harder.
>
> Old rating based polls could be used as a base. The rankings of this
> election could be compared to the rankings of those old polls where we have
> both rating and (derived) ranking information available. Then we would
> tweak the old ratings a bit into the apparent direction to get our current
> estimate.
>
> >
> > Apart from that, the only way I think you can do it is to dissolve the
> problem by asking for ratings information.
>
> Ratings would be more accurate. But also they would have some problems,
> like interest to push the worst opponents down in ratings in order to give
> an impression that nobody likes them.
>
> Vote normalisation is also an interesting problem. Maybe the ratings would
> not be just on a numeric scale, but on a scale that has some named points
> like "unacceptable", "neutral", "very good".
>
> Juho
>
>
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