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Related papers: Lagrangian Inference for Ranking Problems

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Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on open-ended tasks without ground-truth labels is increasingly done via the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm. A critical but under-modeled issue is that judge LLMs differ substantially in reliability;…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Mingyuan Xu , Xinzi Tan , Jiawei Wu , Doudou Zhou

Ranking objects is a simple and natural procedure for organizing data. It is often performed by assigning a quality score to each object according to its relevance to the problem at hand. Ranking is widely used for object selection, when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Or Zuk , Liat Ein-Dor , Eytan Domany

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

Preference-based data often appear complex and noisy but may conceal underlying homogeneous structures. This paper introduces a novel framework of ranking structure recognition for preference-based data. We first develop an approach to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-11 Nan Lu , Jian Shi , Xin-Yu Tian

The ranking problem is to order a collection of units by some unobserved parameter, based on observations from the associated distribution. This problem arises naturally in a number of contexts, such as business, where we may want to rank…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-04 Toby Kenney

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

Ranking entities such as algorithms, devices, methods, or models based on their performances, while accounting for application-specific preferences, is a challenge. To address this challenge, we establish the foundations of a universal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Sébastien Piérard , Anaïs Halin , Anthony Cioppa , Adrien Deliège , Marc Van Droogenbroeck

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-16 M. E. J. Newman

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…

Learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms are ubiquitous and necessary to explore the extensive catalogs of media providers. To avoid the user examining all the results, its preferences are used to provide a subset of relatively small size. The…

Assortment optimization has received active explorations in the past few decades due to its practical importance. Despite the extensive literature dealing with optimization algorithms and latent score estimation, uncertainty quantification…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-05 Shuting Shen , Xi Chen , Ethan X. Fang , Junwei Lu

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Filipa Valdeira , Cláudia Soares

Item recommendation is the task of predicting a personalized ranking on a set of items (e.g. websites, movies, products). In this paper, we investigate the most common scenario with implicit feedback (e.g. clicks, purchases). There are many…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Steffen Rendle , Christoph Freudenthaler , Zeno Gantner , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

This paper studies the performance of the spectral method in the estimation and uncertainty quantification of the unobserved preference scores of compared entities in a general and more realistic setup. Specifically, the comparison graph…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-04 Jianqing Fan , Zhipeng Lou , Weichen Wang , Mengxin Yu

Many binary classification problems minimize misclassification above (or below) a threshold. We show that instances of ranking problems, accuracy at the top or hypothesis testing may be written in this form. We propose a general framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Lukáš Adam , Václav Mácha , Václav Šmídl , Tomáš Pevný

This paper studies a stylized, yet natural, learning-to-rank problem and points out the critical incorrectness of a widely used nearest neighbor algorithm. We consider a model with $n$ agents (users) $\{x_i\}_{i \in [n]}$ and $m$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Ao Liu , Qiong Wu , Zhenming Liu , Lirong Xia

Ranking algorithms are deployed widely to order a set of items in applications such as search engines, news feeds, and recommendation systems. Recent studies, however, have shown that, left unchecked, the output of ranking algorithms can…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-07-31 L. Elisa Celis , Damian Straszak , Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

Pairwise comparison data are widely used to infer latent rankings in areas such as sports, social choice, and machine learning. The Bradley-Terry model provides a foundational probabilistic framework but inherently assumes transitive…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-13 Hisaya Okahara , Tomoyuki Nakagawa , Shonosuke Sugasawa

Ranking or assessing centrality in multivariate and non-Euclidean data is difficult because there is no canonical order and many depth notions become computationally fragile in high-dimensional or structured settings. We introduce a…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-24 Lingfeng Lyu , Doudou Zhou