Related papers: Accelerated MM Algorithms for Ranking Scores Infer…
The EM (Expectation-Maximization) algorithm is regarded as an MM (Majorization-Minimization) algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation of statistical models. Expanding this view, this paper demonstrates that by choosing an appropriate…
The dynamic ranking, due to its increasing importance in many applications, is becoming crucial, especially with the collection of voluminous time-dependent data. One such application is sports statistics, where dynamic ranking aids in…
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…
Many Bayesian statistical inference problems come down to computing a maximum a-posteriori (MAP) assignment of latent variables. Yet, standard methods for estimating the MAP assignment do not have a finite time guarantee that the algorithm…
This paper addresses the estimation of parameters of a Bayesian network from incomplete data. The task is usually tackled by running the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm several times in order to obtain a high log-likelihood…
This paper addresses the item ranking problem with associate covariates, focusing on scenarios where the preference scores can not be fully explained by covariates, and the remaining intrinsic scores, are sparse. Specifically, we extend the…
Marginal maximum likelihood estimation (MMLE) in item response theory (IRT) is highly sensitive to aberrant responses, such as careless answering and random guessing, which can reduce estimation accuracy. To address this issue, this study…
We propose an efficient algorithm for approximate computation of the profile maximum likelihood (PML), a variant of maximum likelihood maximizing the probability of observing a sufficient statistic rather than the empirical sample. The PML…
How to allocate limited resources to projects that will yield the greatest long-term benefits is a problem that often arises in decision-making under uncertainty. For example, organizations may need to evaluate and select innovation…
This work presents an efficient approach for accelerating multilevel Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for large-scale problems using low-fidelity machine learning models. While conventional techniques for large-scale Bayesian…
Training the parameters of statistical models to describe a given data set is a central task in the field of data mining and machine learning. A very popular and powerful way of parameter estimation is the method of maximum likelihood…
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial in ensuring desirable and controllable model behaviors. Current methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization…
This paper proposes a Bayesian model to compare multiple algorithms on multiple data sets, on any metric. The model is based on the Bradley-Terry model, that counts the number of times one algorithm performs better than another on different…
In this paper, we propose a general class of algorithms for optimizing an extensive variety of nonsmoothly penalized objective functions that satisfy certain regularity conditions. The proposed framework utilizes the…
The Mallows model occupies a central role in parametric modelling of ranking data to learn preferences of a population of judges. Despite the wide range of metrics for rankings that can be considered in the model specification, the choice…
Motivated by the home-field advantage in sports, we propose a generalized Bradley--Terry model that incorporates covariate information for paired comparisons. It has an $n$-dimensional merit parameter $\bs{\beta}$ and a fixed-dimensional…
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…
This paper addresses the challenges of aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values via preference learning (PL), focusing on incomplete and corrupted data in preference datasets. We propose a novel method for robustly and…
Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are fundamental statistical tools for modeling heterogeneous data. Due to the nonconcavity of the likelihood function, the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is widely used for parameter estimation of…
Recent advances in the finetuning of large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved their performance on established benchmarks, emphasizing the need for increasingly difficult, synthetic data. A key step in this data generation…