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Related papers: Sorting from Noisy Information

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A common problem in machine learning is to rank a set of n items based on pairwise comparisons. Here ranking refers to partitioning the items into sets of pre-specified sizes according to their scores, which includes identification of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-08 Reinhard Heckel , Max Simchowitz , Kannan Ramchandran , Martin J. Wainwright

We consider the sorted top-$k$ problem whose goal is to recover the top-$k$ items with the correct order out of $n$ items using pairwise comparisons. In many applications, multiple rounds of interaction can be costly. We restrict our…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Mark Braverman , Jieming Mao , Yuval Peres

In this work, we leverage a generative data model considering comparison noise to develop a fast, precise, and informative ranking algorithm from pairwise comparisons that produces a measure of confidence on each comparison. The problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Filipa Valdeira , Cláudia Soares

Noisy data are often viewed as a challenge for decision-making. This paper studies a distributionally robust optimization (DRO) that shows how such noise can be systematically incorporated. Rather than applying DRO to the noisy empirical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-03 Chung-Han Hsieh , Rong Gan

In the noisy population recovery problem of Dvir et al., the goal is to learn an unknown distribution $f$ on binary strings of length $n$ from noisy samples. For some parameter $\mu \in [0,1]$, a noisy sample is generated by flipping each…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2016-02-25 Anindya De , Michael Saks , Sijian Tang

We revisit the well-known problem of sorting under partial information: sort a finite set given the outcomes of comparisons between some pairs of elements. The input is a partially ordered set P, and solving the problem amounts to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-01-22 Jean Cardinal , Samuel Fiorini , Gwenaël Joret , Raphaël Jungers , J. Ian Munro

We introduce a novel noisy sorting model motivated by the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) model from experimental psychology. The goal of our model is to capture the low quality of the data that are collected from crowdsourcing…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Ellen Vitercik , Manolis Zampetakis , David Zhang

Motivated by applications in single-cell biology and metagenomics, we investigate the problem of matrix reordering based on a noisy disordered monotone Toeplitz matrix model. We establish the fundamental statistical limit for this problem…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-08-15 T. Tony Cai , Rong Ma

Machine learning in the context of noise is a challenging but practical setting to plenty of real-world applications. Most of the previous approaches in this area focus on the pairwise relation (casual or correlational relationship) with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Qizhou Wang , Jiangchao Yao , Chen Gong , Tongliang Liu , Mingming Gong , Hongxia Yang , Bo Han

Ranking items based on pairwise comparisons is common, from using match outcomes to rank sports teams to using purchase or survey data to rank consumer products. Statistical inference-based methods such as the Bradley-Terry model, which…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-01-09 Sebastian Morel-Balbi , Alec Kirkley

This work concerns learning probabilistic models for ranking data in a heterogeneous population. The specific problem we study is learning the parameters of a Mallows Mixture Model. Despite being widely studied, current heuristics for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-03 Pranjal Awasthi , Avrim Blum , Or Sheffet , Aravindan Vijayaraghavan

Motivated by crowdsourced computation, peer-grading, and recommendation systems, Braverman, Mao and Weinberg [STOC'16] studied the \emph{query} and \emph{round} complexity of fundamental problems such as finding the maximum (\textsc{max}),…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Vincent Cohen-Addad , Frederik Mallmann-Trenn , Claire Mathieu

This paper re-examines the use of response time to infer problem complexity. It revisits a canonical Wald model of optimal stopping, taking signal-to-noise ratio as a measure of problem complexity. While choice quality is monotone in…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-19 Duarte Gonçalves

The minimization of convex functions which are only available through partial and noisy information is a key methodological problem in many disciplines. In this paper we consider convex optimization with noisy zero-th order information,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Francis Bach , Vianney Perchet

This paper considers the problem of recovering the permutation of an n-dimensional random vector X observed in Gaussian noise. First, a general expression for the probability of error is derived when a linear decoder (i.e., linear estimator…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Minoh Jeong , Alex Dytso , Martina Cardone

The explanations of large language models have recently been shown to be sensitive to the randomness used for their training, creating a need to characterize this sensitivity. In this paper, we propose a characterization that questions the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Jeremie Bogaert , Francois-Xavier Standaert

We consider the problem of estimating a rank-one matrix in Gaussian noise under a probabilistic model for the left and right factors of the matrix. The probabilistic model can impose constraints on the factors including sparsity and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-09-16 Alyson K. Fletcher , Sundeep Rangan

In this paper, we consider a novel machine learning problem, that is, learning a classifier from noisy label distributions. In this problem, each instance with a feature vector belongs to at least one group. Then, instead of the true label…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-17 Yuya Yoshikawa

Consider a noisy linear observation model with an unknown permutation, based on observing $y = \Pi^* A x^* + w$, where $x^* \in \mathbb{R}^d$ is an unknown vector, $\Pi^*$ is an unknown $n \times n$ permutation matrix, and $w \in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-08-10 Ashwin Pananjady , Martin J. Wainwright , Thomas A. Courtade

Inverse optimization refers to the inference of unknown parameters of an optimization problem based on knowledge of its optimal solutions. This paper considers inverse optimization in the setting where measurements of the optimal solutions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-12-27 Anil Aswani , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Auyon Siddiq