Shapley Meets Tutte

Abstract

We initiate the study of cooperative games where there exist groups of pre-aligned agent. For example, in a road network, the agents are cross-roads and pre-aligned groups are road-segments. For a set of datasets, the agents are attributes and each database which connects two (or more) attributes is pre-aligned. In this paper, each pre-aligned group has size two. Our goal is to find a way to determine the contribution of each individual local connection (pre-aligned couple) to the connectivity of the network, having an adversarial attack in mind or planning a defense of the network, or wanting to split the profits of the network between various owners of the individual local connections of the network. We model these contributions by Shapley values of the connectivity augmented 'local values' which are characteristic functions determined, e.g., by failure probabilities of local connections. We link the concepts of potential and Shapley values of these connectivity augmented local values to the world of chromatic and Tutte polynomials and the partition function of the Potts model from statistical physics.