English

Asymptotic comparison of identifying constraints for Bradley-Terry models

Statistics Theory 2022-05-10 v1 Methodology Statistics Theory

Abstract

The Bradley-Terry model is widely used for pairwise comparison data analysis. In this paper, we analyze the asymptotic behavior of the maximum likelihood estimator of the Bradley-Terry model in its logistic parameterization, under a general class of linear identifiability constraints. We show that the constraint requiring the Bradley-Terry scores for all compared objects to sum to zero minimizes the sum of the variances of the estimated scores, and recommend using this constraint in practice.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.04341,
  title  = {Asymptotic comparison of identifying constraints for Bradley-Terry models},
  author = {Weichen Wu and Brian W. Junker and Nynke M. D. Niezink},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.04341},
  year   = {2022}
}