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Related papers: Parameter Estimation for Thurstone Choice Models

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Statistical inference in parametric models (e.g., the Bradley--Terry model and its variants) for paired-comparison data has been explored in the high-dimensional regime, in which the number of items involving in paired comparisons diverges.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-01 Haoyue Song , Lianqiang Qu , Ting Yan , Yuguo Chen

Parameter ensembles or sets of point estimates constitute one of the cornerstones of modern statistical practice. This is especially the case in Bayesian hierarchical models, where different decision-theoretic frameworks can be deployed to…

Methodology · Statistics 2011-06-10 Cedric E. Ginestet , Nicky G. Best , Sylvia Richardson

In the Bradley-Terry model for paired comparisons, and its extensions to include order effects and ties, the maximum likelihood estimates of probabilities of certain outcomes can be 0 or 1 under certain data configurations. This poses…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Kenneth Butler , John T. Whelan

It is a well-known issue that in Item Response Theory models there is no closed-form for the maximum likelihood estimators of the item parameters. Parameter estimation is therefore typically achieved by means of numerical methods like…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-28 Stefano Noventa , Roberto Faleh , Augustin Kelava

This technical report studies the problem of ranking from pairwise comparisons in the classical Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, with a focus on score estimation. For general graphs, we show that, with sufficiently many samples, maximum…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-17 Yanxi Chen

A number of applications (e.g., AI bot tournaments, sports, peer grading, crowdsourcing) use pairwise comparison data and the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model to evaluate a given collection of items (e.g., bots, teams, students, search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Jingyan Wang , Nihar B. Shah , R. Ravi

Given a set of pairwise comparisons, the classical ranking problem computes a single ranking that best represents the preferences of all users. In this paper, we study the problem of inferring individual preferences, arising in the context…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-18 Rui Wu , Jiaming Xu , R. Srikant , Laurent Massoulié , Marc Lelarge , Bruce Hajek

We propose the Heterogeneous Thurstone Model (HTM) for aggregating ranked data, which can take the accuracy levels of different users into account. By allowing different noise distributions, the proposed HTM model maintains the generality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-04 Tao Jin , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu , Farzad Farnoud

In this paper, we study a popular method for inference of the Bradley-Terry model parameters, namely the MM algorithm, for maximum likelihood estimation and maximum a posteriori probability estimation. This class of models includes the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-29 Milan Vojnovic , Seyoung Yun , Kaifang Zhou

This contribution introduces a novel statistical learning methodology based on the Bradley-Terry method for pairwise comparisons, where the novelty arises from the method's capacity to estimate the worth of objects for a primary attribute…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-26 Sjoerd Hermes , Joost van Heerwaarden , Pariya Behrouzi

The Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model is a benchmark model for pairwise comparisons between individuals. Despite recent progress on the first-order asymptotics of several popular procedures, the understanding of uncertainty quantification in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-08-11 Chao Gao , Yandi Shen , Anderson Y. Zhang

Traditional statistical inference on ordinal comparison data results in an overall ranking of objects, e.g., from best to worst, with each object having a unique rank. However, ranks of some objects may not be statistically distinguishable.…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-27 Michael Pearce , Elena A. Erosheva

We consider the problem of aggregating pairwise comparisons to obtain a consensus ranking order over a collection of objects. We use the popular Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model which allows us to probabilistically describe pairwise…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Mine Alsan , Ranjitha Prasad , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Most statistical models for pairwise comparisons, including the Bradley-Terry (BT) and Thurstone models and many extensions, make a relatively strong assumption of stochastic transitivity. This assumption imposes the existence of an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-12 Sze Ming Lee , Yunxiao Chen

When the number of subjects, $n$, is large, paired comparisons are often sparse. Here, we study statistical inference in a class of paired comparison models parameterized by a set of merit parameters, under an Erd\"{o}s--R\'{e}nyi…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Qiuping Wang , Lu Pan , Ting Yan

We consider the problem of top-k subset selection in Dueling Bandit problems with score information. Real-world pairwise ranking problems often exhibit a high degree of transitivity and prior work has suggested sampling methods that exploit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Matthew Groves , Juergen Branke

Identifying leading measurement units from a large collection is a common inference task in various domains of large-scale inference. Testing approaches, which measure evidence against a null hypothesis rather than effect magnitude, tend to…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-17 Nicholas C. Henderson , Michael A. Newton

The question of aggregating pair-wise comparisons to obtain a global ranking over a collection of objects has been of interest for a very long time: be it ranking of online gamers (e.g. MSR's TrueSkill system) and chess players, aggregating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-13 Sahand Negahban , Sewoong Oh , Devavrat Shah

We measure LLMs' output error at pairwise text comparison, noting the probability of error in their preferences. Our method does not rely on the ground truth and supports two scenarios: (i) uniform error rate regardless of the order of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Tianyi Li

Well-calibrated predictions of user preferences are essential for many applications. Since recommender systems typically select the top-N items for users, calibration for those top-N items, rather than for all items, is important. We show…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Masahiro Sato