Related papers: Random pairing MLE for estimation of item paramete…
The Rasch model has been widely used to analyse item response data in psychometrics and educational assessments. When the number of individuals and items are large, it may be impractical to provide all possible responses. It is desirable to…
The Rasch model is one of the most fundamental models in \emph{item response theory} and has wide-ranging applications from education testing to recommendation systems. In a universe with $n$ users and $m$ items, the Rasch model assumes…
The Rasch model is widely used for item response analysis in applications ranging from recommender systems to psychology, education, and finance. While a number of estimators have been proposed for the Rasch model over the last decades, 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…
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…
Joint maximum likelihood (JML) estimation is one of the earliest approaches to fitting item response theory (IRT) models. This procedure treats both the item and person parameters as unknown but fixed model parameters and estimates them…
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…
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…
Estimating model parameters is a crucial step in mathematical modelling and typically involves minimizing the disagreement between model predictions and experimental data. This calibration data can change throughout a study, particularly if…
The Rasch model is the most prominent member of the class of latent trait models that are in common use. The main reason is that it can be considered as a measurement model that allows to separate person and item parameters, a feature that…
Structured Latent Attribute Models (SLAMs) are a family of discrete latent variable models widely used in education, psychology, and epidemiology to model multivariate categorical data. A SLAM assumes that multiple discrete latent…
Consider a setting with $N$ independent individuals, each with an unknown parameter, $p_i \in [0, 1]$ drawn from some unknown distribution $P^\star$. After observing the outcomes of $t$ independent Bernoulli trials, i.e., $X_i \sim…
The Laplace approximation (LA) has been proposed as a method for approximating the marginal likelihood of statistical models with latent variables. However, the approximate maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) based on the LA are often…
Modeling sparse data such as microbiome and transcriptomics (RNA-seq) data is very challenging due to the exceeded number of zeros and skewness of the distribution. Many probabilistic models have been used for modeling sparse data,…
Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) are widely used methods for estimating the transition probability matrix in Markov chains and identifying significant relationships between transitions, such as equality.…
Misclassification of binary responses, if ignored, may severely bias the maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) of regression parameters. For such data, a binary regression model incorporating misclassification probabilities is extensively…
In order to learn the complex features of large spatio-temporal data, models with large parameter sets are often required. However, estimating a large number of parameters is often infeasible due to the computational and memory costs of…
This paper explores the suitability of using automatically discovered topics from MOOC discussion forums for modelling students' academic abilities. The Rasch model from psychometrics is a popular generative probabilistic model that relates…
Statistical inference using pairwise comparison data is an effective approach to analyzing large-scale sparse networks. In this paper, we propose a general framework to model the mutual interactions in a network, which enjoys ample…
Since the recent study (Krichene and Rendle 2020) done by Krichene and Rendle on the sampling-based top-k evaluation metric for recommendation, there has been a lot of debates on the validity of using sampling to evaluate recommendation…