Comparing and Aggregating Partial Orders with Kendall Tau Distances

Abstract

Comparing and ranking information is an important topic in social and information sciences, and in particular on the web. Its objective is to measure the difference of the preferences of voters on a set of candidates and to compute a consensus ranking. Commonly, each voter provides a total order or a bucket order of all candidates, where bucket orders allow ties.

In this work we consider the generalization of total and bucket orders to partial orders and compare them by the nearest neighbor and the Hausdorff Kendall tau distances. For total and bucket orders these distances can be computed in $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ time. We show that the computation of the nearest neighbor Kendall tau distance is NP-hard, 2-approximable and fixed-parameter tractable for a total and a partial order. The computation of the Hausdorff Kendall tau distance for a total and a partial order is shown to be coNP-hard.

The rank aggregation problem is known to be NP-complete for total and bucket orders, even for four voters and solvable in $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$ for two voters. It is NP-complete for two partial orders and the nearest neighbor Kendall tau distance. For the Hausdorff Kendall tau distance it is in $\mathbf{\Sigma_2^p}$, but not in NP or coNP unless $\ensuremath{\mathbf{NP}} = \ensuremath{\mathbf{coNP}}$, even for four voters.