Related papers: Selecting universities: personal preference and ra…
The importance of a node in a directed graph can be measured by its PageRank. The PageRank of a node is used in a number of application contexts - including ranking websites - and can be interpreted as the average portion of time spent at…
In school choice, students make decisions based on their expectations of particular schools' suitability, and the decision to gather information about schools is influenced by the acceptance odds determined by the mechanism in place. We…
We study the geometrical properties of the utility space (the space of expected utilities over a finite set of options), which is commonly used to model the preferences of an agent in a situation of uncertainty. We focus on the case where…
The definition of preferences assigned to individuals is a concept that concerns many disciplines, from economics, with the search of an acceptable outcome for an ensemble of individuals, to decision making an analysis of vote systems. We…
To what extent can we distinguish one probability distribution from another? Are there quantitative measures of distinguishability? The goal of this tutorial is to approach such questions by introducing the notion of the "distance" between…
Distributions over rankings are used to model data in various settings such as preference analysis and political elections. The factorial size of the space of rankings, however, typically forces one to make structural assumptions, such as…
We propose a measure of shape which is appropriate for the study of a complicated geometric structure, defined using the topology of neighborhoods of the structure. One aspect of this measure gives a new notion of fractal dimension. We…
A variety of descent and major-index statistics have been defined for symmetric groups, hyperoctahedral groups, and their generalizations. Typically associated to pairs of such statistics is an Euler--Mahonian distribution, a bivariate…
The present work is part of a research line seeking to uncover the mysteries of what lies behind people's musical preferences in order to provide better music recommendations. More specifically, it takes the angle of personal values.…
The many metrics employed for the evaluation of search engine results have not themselves been conclusively evaluated. We propose a new measure for a metric's ability to identify user preference of result lists. Using this measure, we…
Many information access systems operationalize their results in terms of rankings, which are then displayed to users in various ranking layouts such as linear lists or grids. User interaction with a retrieved item is highly dependent on the…
The work applies the funnel plot methodology to measure and visualize uncertainty in the research performance of Italian universities in the science disciplines. The performance assessment is carried out at both discipline and overall…
This paper proposes a multiple-membership generalized linear mixed model for ranking college football teams using only their win/loss records. The model results in an intractable, high-dimensional integral due to the random effects…
Algorithmic decisions in critical domains such as hiring, college admissions, and lending are often based on rankings. Given the impact of these decisions on individuals, organizations, and population groups, it is essential to understand…
Many applications motivate the distance measure between rankings, such as comparing top-k lists and rank aggregation for voting, and intrigue great interest to researchers. For example, for a search engine, the use of different ranking…
We propose a framework to assess how to optimally sort and grade students of heterogenous ability. Potential employers face uncertainty regarding an individual's productive value. Knowing which school an individual went to is useful for two…
We revisit a classical question of how individual consumer preferences and incomes shape aggregate behavior. We develop a method that applies to populations with homothetic preferences and reduces the hard problem of aggregation to simply…
A preference system $\mathcal{I}$ is an undirected graph where vertices have preferences over their neighbors, and $\mathcal{I}$ admits a master list if all preferences can be derived from a single ordering over all vertices. We study the…
Eliciting preferences from human judgements is inherently imprecise, yet most decision analysis methods force a single priority vector from pairwise comparisons, discarding the information embedded in inconsistencies. We instead leverage…
Information Retrieval evaluation has traditionally focused on defining principled ways of assessing the relevance of a ranked list of documents with respect to a query. Several methods extend this type of evaluation beyond relevance, making…