Generalized Method-of-Moments for Rank Aggregation

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2013)

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Authors

Hossein Azari Soufiani, William Chen, David C. Parkes, Lirong Xia

Abstract

In this paper we propose a class of efficient Generalized Method-of-Moments(GMM) algorithms for computing parameters of the Plackett-Luce model, where the data consists of full rankings over alternatives. Our technique is based on breaking the full rankings into pairwise comparisons, and then computing parameters that satisfy a set of generalized moment conditions. We identify conditions for the output of GMM to be unique, and identify a general class of consistent and inconsistent breakings. We then show by theory and experiments that our algorithms run significantly faster than the classical Minorize-Maximization (MM) algorithm, while achieving competitive statistical efficiency.