Related papers: Statistical and computational challenges in rankin…
We introduce the problem of ranking with slot constraints, which can be used to model a wide range of application problems -- from college admission with limited slots for different majors, to composing a stratified cohort of eligible…
Crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective platform for labeling large amounts of data in a cost- and time-efficient manner. Most previous work has focused on designing an efficient algorithm to recover only the ground-truth labels of the…
We consider the problem of counting the number of possible sets of rankings (called ranking patterns) generated by unfolding models of codimension one. We express the ranking patterns as slices of the braid arrangement and show that all…
The study of online decision-making problems that leverage contextual information has drawn notable attention due to their significant applications in fields ranging from healthcare to autonomous systems. In modern applications, contextual…
Rank estimation is a classical model order selection problem that arises in a variety of important statistical signal and array processing systems, yet is addressed relatively infrequently in the extant literature. Here we present sample…
Online learning with expert advice is a fundamental problem of sequential prediction. In this problem, the algorithm has access to a set of $n$ "experts" who make predictions on each day. The goal on each day is to process these…
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…
We present reputation-based mechanisms for building reliable task computing systems over the Internet. The most characteristic examples of such systems are the volunteer computing and the crowdsourcing platforms. In both examples end users…
We consider the problem of maximizing an unknown function over a compact and convex set using as few observations as possible. We observe that the optimization of the function essentially relies on learning the induced bipartite ranking…
Learning-to-rank (LTR) is a class of supervised learning techniques that apply to ranking problems dealing with a large number of features. The popularity and widespread application of LTR models in prioritizing information in a variety of…
How should we present training examples to learners to teach them classification rules? This is a natural problem when training workers for crowdsourcing labeling tasks, and is also motivated by challenges in data-driven online education.…
Rank aggregation is an essential approach for aggregating the preferences of multiple agents. One rule of particular interest is the Kemeny rule, which maximises the number of pairwise agreements between the final ranking and the existing…
We consider the problem of optimal budget allocation for crowdsourcing problems, allocating users to tasks to maximize our final confidence in the crowdsourced answers. Such an optimized worker assignment method allows us to boost the…
The top word list, i.e., the top-M words with highest marginal probability in a given topic, is the standard topic representation in topic models. Most of recent automatical topic labeling algorithms and popular topic quality metrics are…
In the online learning with experts problem, an algorithm must make a prediction about an outcome on each of $T$ days (or times), given a set of $n$ experts who make predictions on each day (or time). The algorithm is given feedback on the…
In this paper, we provide a novel algorithm for solving planning and learning problems of Markov decision processes. The proposed algorithm follows a policy iteration-type update by using a rank-one approximation of the transition…
Submodular maximization has been the backbone of many important machine-learning problems, and has applications to viral marketing, diversification, sensor placement, and more. However, the study of maximizing submodular functions has…
Consider the following problem faced by an online voting platform: A user is provided with a list of alternatives, and is asked to rank them in order of preference using only drag-and-drop operations. The platform's goal is to recommend an…
We study the problem of frequent itemset mining in domains where data is not recorded in a conventional database but only exists in human knowledge. We provide examples of such scenarios, and present a crowdsourcing model for them. The…
Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant…