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Related papers: Aggregating Incomplete and Noisy Rankings

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This paper presents a natural extension of stagewise ranking to the the case of infinitely many items. We introduce the infinite generalized Mallows model (IGM), describe its properties and give procedures to estimate it from data. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-18 Marina Meila , Le Bao

We analyze the generalized Mallows model, a popular exponential model over rankings. Estimating the central (or consensus) ranking from data is NP-hard. We obtain the following new results: (1) We show that search methods can estimate both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Marina Meila , Kapil Phadnis , Arthur Patterson , Jeff A. Bilmes

In heterogeneous rank aggregation problems, users often exhibit various accuracy levels when comparing pairs of items. Thus a uniform querying strategy over users may not be optimal. To address this issue, we propose an elimination-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-11 Yue Wu , Tao Jin , Hao Lou , Pan Xu , Farzad Farnoud , Quanquan Gu

We study the problem of recovering an incomplete $m\times n$ matrix of rank $r$ with columns arriving online over time. This is known as the problem of life-long matrix completion, and is widely applied to recommendation system, computer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-04 Maria-Florina Balcan , Hongyang Zhang

The Mallows model is a popular distribution for ranked data. We empirically and theoretically analyze how the properties of rankings sampled from the Mallows model change when increasing the number of alternatives. We find that real-world…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-29 Niclas Boehmer , Piotr Faliszewski , Sonja Kraiczy

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

A preference order or ranking aggregated from pairwise comparison data is commonly understood as a strict total order. However, in real-world scenarios, some items are intrinsically ambiguous in comparisons, which may very well be an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-31 Qianqian Xu , Jiechao Xiong , Xinwei Sun , Zhiyong Yang , Xiaochun Cao , Qingming Huang , Yuan Yao

The classic Mallows model is a foundational tool for modeling user preferences. However, it has limitations in capturing real-world scenarios, where users often focus only on a limited set of preferred items and are indifferent to the rest.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Shahrzad Haddadan , Sara Ahmadian

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

We propose the Pseudo-Mallows distribution over the set of all permutations of $n$ items, to approximate the posterior distribution with a Mallows likelihood. The Mallows model has been proven to be useful for recommender systems where it…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-30 Qinghua Liu , Valeria Vitelli , Carlo Mannino , Arnoldo Frigessi , Ida Scheel

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

We consider the problem of statistical inference for ranking data, specifically rank aggregation, under the assumption that samples are incomplete in the sense of not comprising all choice alternatives. In contrast to most existing methods,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-12-05 Mohsen Ahmadi Fahandar , Eyke Hüllermeier , Inés Couso

In this letter, we study the deterministic sampling patterns for the completion of low rank matrix, when corrupted with a sparse noise, also known as robust matrix completion. We extend the recent results on the deterministic sampling…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-03-14 Morteza Ashraphijuo , Vaneet Aggarwal , Xiaodong Wang

This paper proposes a new method for solving the well-known rank aggregation problem from pairwise comparisons using the method of low-rank matrix completion. The partial and noisy data of pairwise comparisons is transformed into a matrix…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-15 Tal Levy , Alireza Vahid , Raja Giryes

The label ranking problem is a supervised learning scenario in which the learner predicts a total order of the class labels for a given input instance. Recently, research has increasingly focused on the partial label ranking problem, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jiayi Wang , Juan C. Alfaro , Viktor Bengs

This paper addresses the challenge of a particular class of noisy state observations in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), a common issue in various real-world applications. We focus on modeling this uncertainty through a confusion matrix…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Amirhossein Afsharrad , Sanjay Lall

Rankings are a type of preference elicitation that arise in experiments where assessors arrange items, for example, in decreasing order of utility. Orderings of n items labelled {1,...,n} denoted are permutations that reflect strict…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-20 Luiza S. C. Piancastelli , Nial Friel

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-21 Marta Crispino , Cristina Mollica , Valerio Astuti , Luca Tardella

Incomplete rankings on a set of items $\{1,\; \ldots,\; n\}$ are orderings of the form $a_{1}\prec\dots\prec a_{k}$, with $\{a_{1},\dots a_{k}\}\subset\{1,\dots,n\}$ and $k < n$. Though they arise in many modern applications, only a few…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-03-11 Stéphan Clémençon , Jérémie Jakubowicz , Eric Sibony

In this work, we consider ranking problems among a finite set of candidates: for instance, selecting the top-$k$ items among a larger list of candidates or obtaining the full ranking of all items in the set. These problems are often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-04 Ruiting Liang , Jake A. Soloff , Rina Foygel Barber , Rebecca Willett