Related papers: Stretching the Effectiveness of MLE from Accuracy …
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…
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…
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…
The Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model is a popular statistical approach for estimating the global ranking of a collection of items using pairwise comparisons. To ensure accurate ranking, it is essential to obtain precise estimates of the model…
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…
Maximum likelihood is the most widely used statistical estimation technique. Recent work by the authors introduced a general methodology for the construction of estimators for functionals in parametric models, and demonstrated improvements…
The Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model is one of the most widely used models for ranking a collection of items or agents based on pairwise comparisons among them. Given $n$ agents, the BTL model endows each agent $i$ with a latent skill score…
We advocate for a practical Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach towards designing loss functions for regression and forecasting, as an alternative to the typical approach of direct empirical risk minimization on a specific target…
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…
A central goal of algorithmic fairness is to reduce bias in automated decision making. An unavoidable tension exists between accuracy gains obtained by using sensitive information (e.g., gender or ethnic group) as part of a statistical…
The Rasch model, a classical model in the item response theory, is widely used in psychometrics to model the relationship between individuals' latent traits and their binary responses to assessments or questionnaires. In this paper, we…
Machine learning software is being used in many applications (finance, hiring, admissions, criminal justice) having a huge social impact. But sometimes the behavior of this software is biased and it shows discrimination based on some…
This paper is concerned with the problem of top-$K$ ranking from pairwise comparisons. Given a collection of $n$ items and a few pairwise comparisons across them, one wishes to identify the set of $K$ items that receive the highest ranks.…
Given partially observed pairwise comparison data generated by the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, we study the problem of top-$k$ ranking. That is, to optimally identify the set of top-$k$ players. We derive the minimax rate with respect…
Data in the form of pairwise comparisons arises in many domains, including preference elicitation, sporting competitions, and peer grading among others. We consider parametric ordinal models for such pairwise comparison data involving a…
There are various parametric models for analyzing pairwise comparison data, including the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) and Thurstone models, but their reliance on strong parametric assumptions is limiting. In this work, we study a flexible…
Standard benchmarks of bias and fairness in large language models (LLMs) measure the association between the user attributes stated or implied by a prompt and the LLM's short text response, but human-AI interaction increasingly requires…
We consider the problem of ranking $n$ players from partial pairwise comparison data under the Bradley-Terry-Luce model. For the first time in the literature, the minimax rate of this ranking problem is derived with respect to the Kendall's…
This paper explores the preference-based top-$K$ rank aggregation problem. Suppose that a collection of items is repeatedly compared in pairs, and one wishes to recover a consistent ordering that emphasizes the top-$K$ ranked items, based…
The standard way to evaluate language models on subjective tasks is through pairwise comparisons: an annotator chooses the "better" of two responses to a prompt. Leaderboards aggregate these comparisons into a single Bradley-Terry (BT)…