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Motivated by the home-field advantage in sports, we propose a generalized Bradley--Terry model that incorporates covariate information for paired comparisons. It has an $n$-dimensional merit parameter $\bs{\beta}$ and a fixed-dimensional…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-31 Ting Yan

The rating of items based on pairwise comparisons has been a topic of statistical investigation for many decades. Numerous approaches have been proposed. One of the best known is the Bradley-Terry model. This paper seeks to assemble and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Ian Hamilton , Nick Tawn , David Firth

We consider the problem of top-k subset selection in Dueling Bandit problems with score information. Real-world pairwise ranking problems often exhibit a high degree of transitivity and prior work has suggested sampling methods that exploit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Matthew Groves , Juergen Branke

PageRank and the Bradley-Terry model are competing approaches to ranking entities such as teams in sports tournaments or journals in citation networks. The Bradley-Terry model is a classical statistical method for ranking based on paired…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-13 David Antony Selby

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 --…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Hao Sun , Yunyi Shen , Jean-Francois Ton

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Jingyan Wang , Nihar B. Shah , R. Ravi

The Bradley-Terry model is widely used for the analysis of pairwise comparison data and, in essence, produces a ranking of the items under comparison. We embed the Bradley-Terry model within a stochastic block model, allowing items to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-06 Lapo Santi , Nial Friel

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

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-16 Heejong Bong , Alessandro Rinaldo

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-30 Wanshan Li , Daren Wang , Alessandro Rinaldo

In a wide class of paired comparisons, especially in the sports games, in which all subjects are divided into several groups, the intragroup comparisons are dense and the intergroup comparisons are sparse. Typical examples include the NFL…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2012-06-11 Ting Yan , Jinfeng Xu , Yaning Yang

Linear stochastic transitivity is a central assumption in paired comparison models that is rarely verified in practice. Empirical violations, however, are common and can substantially affect inference and ranking. We develop a class of…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Rahul Singh , Ori Davidov

The Bradley-Terry model assigns probabilities for the outcome of paired comparison experiments based on strength parameters associated with the objects being compared. We consider different proposed choices of prior parameter distributions…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-12-15 John T. Whelan

We propose a general framework for statistical inference on the overall strengths of players in pairwise comparisons, allowing for potential shifts in the covariate distribution. These covariates capture important contextual information…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-10 Xiudi Li , Sijia Li

Comparison data arises in many important contexts, e.g. shopping, web clicks, or sports competitions. Typically we are given a dataset of comparisons and wish to train a model to make predictions about the outcome of unseen comparisons. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-25 Stephen Ragain , Alexander Peysakhovich , Johan Ugander

The Bradley-Terry model is widely used for pairwise comparison data analysis. In this paper, we analyze the asymptotic behavior of the maximum likelihood estimator of the Bradley-Terry model in its logistic parameterization, under a general…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-05-10 Weichen Wu , Brian W. Junker , Nynke M. D. Niezink

Transition Path Theory (TPT) provides a rigorous statistical characterization of the ensemble of trajectories connecting directly, i.e., without detours, two disconnected (sets of) states in a Markov chain, a stochastic process that…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-06-28 G. Bonner , F. J. Beron-Vera , M. J. Olascoaga

We consider sequential or active ranking of a set of n items based on noisy pairwise comparisons. Items are ranked according to the probability that a given item beats a randomly chosen item, and ranking refers to partitioning the items…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-26 Reinhard Heckel , Nihar B. Shah , Kannan Ramchandran , Martin J. Wainwright

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-17 Yanxi Chen

This paper deals with the estimation of the unknown distribution of hidden random variables from the observation of pairwise comparisons between these variables. This problem is inspired by recent developments on Bradley-Terry models in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-08-27 Sylvain Le Corff , Matthieu Lerasle , Elodie Vernet