A Supervised Learning Approach to Rankability

The rankability of data is a recently proposed problem that considers the ability of a dataset, represented as a graph, to produce a meaningful ranking of the items it contains. To study this concept, a number of rankability measures have recently been proposed, based on comparisons to a complete dominance graph via combinatorial and linear algebraic methods. In this paper, we review these measures and highlight some questions to which they give rise before going on to propose new methods to assess rankability, which are amenable to efficient estimation. Finally, we compare these measures by applying them to both synthetic and real-life sports data.