Related papers: $\ell_{\infty}$-Bounds of the MLE in the BTL Model…
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 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…
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 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…
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…
Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model estimation is a well-established strategy to rank a collection of items given a dataset of pairwise comparisons. Although the theoretical performance of BTL estimation methods, such as spectral and maximum…
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…
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…
The Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model is a classic and very popular statistical approach for eliciting a global ranking among a collection of items using pairwise comparison data. In applications in which the comparison outcomes are observed…
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…
Many applications such as recommendation systems or sports tournaments involve pairwise comparisons within a collection of $n$ items, the goal being to aggregate the binary outcomes of the comparisons in order to recover the latent strength…
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…
We consider the problem of ranking a set of items from pairwise comparisons in the presence of features associated with the items. Recent works have established that $O(n\log(n))$ samples are needed to rank well when there is no feature…
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 --…
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…
For nonbalanced paired comparisons, a wide variety of ranking methods have been proposed. One of the best popular methods is the Bradley-Terry model in which the ranking of a set of objects is decided by the maximum likelihood estimates…
The question of aggregating pair-wise comparisons to obtain a global ranking over a collection of objects has been of interest for a very long time: be it ranking of online gamers (e.g. MSR's TrueSkill system) and chess players, aggregating…
The maximum likelihood threshold (MLT) of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of samples to almost surely guarantee existence of the maximum likelihood estimate in the corresponding Gaussian graphical model. We give a new characterization of…
The recent paper \cite{GSZ2023} on estimation and inference for top-ranking problem in Bradley-Terry-Lice (BTL) model presented a surprising result: component-wise estimation and inference can be done under much weaker conditions on the…
We revisit the problem of inferring the overall ranking among entities in the framework of Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, based on available empirical data on pairwise preferences. By a simple transformation, we can cast the problem as…