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Rank Centrality: Ranking from Pair-wise Comparisons
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 social opinions, or deciding which product to sell based on
transactions. In most settings, in addition to obtaining a ranking, finding
`scores' for each object (e.g. player's rating) is of interest for
understanding the intensity of the preferences.
In this paper, we propose Rank Centrality, an iterative rank aggregation
algorithm for discovering scores for objects (or items) from pair-wise
comparisons. The algorithm has a natural random walk interpretation over the
graph of objects with an edge present between a pair of objects if they are
compared; the score, which we call Rank Centrality, of an object turns out to
be its stationary probability under this random walk. To study the efficacy of
the algorithm, we consider the popular Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model
(equivalent to the Multinomial Logit (MNL) for pair-wise comparisons) in which
each object has an associated score which determines the probabilistic outcomes
of pair-wise comparisons between objects. In terms of the pair-wise marginal
probabilities, which is the main subject of this paper, the MNL model and the
BTL model are identical. We bound the finite sample error rates between the
scores assumed by the BTL model and those estimated by our algorithm. In
particular, the number of samples required to learn the score well with high
probability depends on the structure of the comparison graph. When the
Laplacian of the comparison graph has a strictly positive spectral gap, e.g.
each item is compared to a subset of randomly chosen items, this leads to
dependence on the number of samples that is nearly order-optimal.Comment: 45 pages, 3 figure
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