Related papers: Accelerated MM Algorithms for Ranking Scores Infer…
The Bradley-Terry model is a popular approach to describe probabilities of the possible outcomes when elements of a set are repeatedly compared with one another in pairs. It has found many applications including animal behaviour, chess…
PageRank and the Bradley-Terry model are competing approaches to ranking entities such as teams in sports tournaments or journals in citation networks. The Bradley-Terry model is a classical statistical method for ranking based on paired…
This paper considers ranking inference of $n$ items based on the observed data on the top choice among $M$ randomly selected items at each trial. This is a useful modification of the Plackett-Luce model for $M$-way ranking with only the top…
Ranking problems based on pairwise comparisons, such as those arising in online gaming, often involve a large pool of items to order. In these situations, the gap in performance between any two items can be significant, and the smallest and…
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…
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…
We study the ranking of individuals, teams, or objects, based on pairwise comparisons between them, using the Bradley-Terry model. Estimates of rankings within this model are commonly made using a simple iterative algorithm first introduced…
Variance components estimation and mixed model analysis are central themes in statistics with applications in numerous scientific disciplines. Despite the best efforts of generations of statisticians and numerical analysts, maximum…
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…
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…
The Bradley-Terry (BT) model is a common and successful practice in reward modeling for Large Language Model (LLM) alignment. However, it remains unclear why this model -- originally developed for multi-player stochastic game matching --…
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…
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…
Several methods of preference modeling, ranking, voting and multi-criteria decision making include pairwise comparisons. It is usually simpler to compare two objects at a time, furthermore, some relations (e.g., the outcome of sports…
The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is a well-known iterative method for computing maximum likelihood estimates from incomplete data. Despite its numerous advantages, a main drawback of the EM algorithm is its frequently observed…
The convergence of expectation-maximization (EM)-based algorithms typically requires continuity of the likelihood function with respect to all the unknown parameters (optimization variables). The requirement is not met when parameters…
Latent class model (LCM), which is a finite mixture of different categorical distributions, is one of the most widely used models in statistics and machine learning fields. Because of its non-continuous nature and the flexibility in shape,…
Many applications, e.g. in content recommendation, sports, or recruitment, leverage the comparisons of alternatives to score those alternatives. The classical Bradley-Terry model and its variants have been widely used to do so. The…
We propose a novel combinatorial inference framework to conduct general uncertainty quantification in ranking problems. We consider the widely adopted Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, where each item is assigned a positive preference score…
Matching pursuit algorithms are an important class of algorithms in signal processing and machine learning. We present a blended matching pursuit algorithm, combining coordinate descent-like steps with stronger gradient descent steps, for…