Privacy in elections: K-anonymizing preference orders

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study the (parameterized) complexity of a combinatorial problem, motivated by the desire to publish elections-related data, while preserving the privacy of the voters (humans or agents). In this problem, introduced and defined here, we are given an election, a voting rule, and a distance function over elections. The task is to find an election which is not too far away from the original election (with respect to the given distance function) while preserving the election winner (with respect to the given voting rule), and such that the resulting election is k-anonymized; an election is said to be k-anonymous if for each voter in it there are at least k − 1 other voters with the same preference order. We consider the problem of k-anonymizing elections for the Plurality rule and for the Condorcet rule, for the Discrete distance and for the Swap distance. We show that the parameterized complexity landscape of our problem is diverse, with cases ranging from being polynomial-time solvable to Para-NP-hard.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFundamentals of Computation Theory - 20th International Symposium, FCT 2015, Proceedings
EditorsIgor Walukiewicz, Adrian Kosowski
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages299-310
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)9783319221762
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event20th International Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theory, FCT 2015 - Gdansk, Poland
Duration: 17 Aug 201519 Aug 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9210
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference20th International Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theory, FCT 2015
Country/TerritoryPoland
CityGdansk
Period17/08/1519/08/15

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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