The Mallows model, introduced in the seminal paper of Mallows 1957, is one of the most fundamental ranking distribution over the symmetric group @math . To analyze more complex ranking data, several studies considered the Generalized Mallows model defined by Fligner and Verducci 1986. Despite the significant research interest of ranking distributions, the exact sample complexity of estimating the parameters of a Mallows and a Generalized Mallows Model is not well-understood. The main result of the paper is a tight sample complexity bound for learning Mallows and Generalized Mallows Model. We approach the learning problem by analyzing a more general model which interpolates between the single parameter Mallows Model and the @math parameter Mallows model. We call our model Mallows Block Model -- referring to the Block Models that are a popular model in theoretical statistics. Our sample complexity analysis gives tight bound for learning the Mallows Block Model for any number of blocks. We provide essentially matching lower bounds for our sample complexity results. As a corollary of our analysis, it turns out that, if the central ranking is known, one single sample from the Mallows Block Model is sufficient to estimate the spread parameters with error that goes to zero as the size of the permutations goes to infinity. In addition, we calculate the exact rate of the parameter estimation error.
There has been a significant volume of research work on algorithmic and learning problems related to our work. In the , a finite set @math of rankings is given, and we want to compute the ranking @math . This problem is known to be NP-hard , but it admits a polynomial-time @math -approximation algorithm problem and a PTAS . When the rankings are i.i.d. samples from a Mallows distribution, consensus ranking is equivalent to computing the maximum likelihood ranking, which does not depend on the spread parameter. Intuitively, the problem of finding the central ranking should not be hard, if the probability mass is concentrated around the central ranking. @cite_8 came up with a branch and bound technique which relies on this observation. @cite_9 proposed a dynamic programming approach that computes the consensus ranking efficiently, under the Mallows model. @cite_10 showed that the central ranking can be recovered from a logarithmic number of i.i.d. samples from a Mallows distribution (see also Theorem ).
@cite_9 @cite_10 @cite_8
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This paper studies problems of inferring order given noisy information. In these problems there is an unknown order (permutation) @math on @math elements denoted by @math . We assume that information is generated in a way correlated with @math . The goal is to find a maximum likelihood @math given the information observed. We will consider two different types of observations: noisy comparisons and noisy orders. The data in Noisy orders are permutations given from an exponential distribution correlated with (this is also called the Mallow's model). The data in Noisy Comparisons is a signal given for each pair of elements which is correlated with their true ordering. In this paper we present polynomial time algorithms for solving both problems with high probability. As part of our proof we show that for both models the maximum likelihood solution @math is close to the original permutation @math . Our results are of interest in applications to ranking, such as ranking in sports, or ranking of search items based on comparisons by experts. A well-studied approach to the design of voting rules views them as maximum likelihood estimators; given votes that are seen as noisy estimates of a true ranking of the alternatives, the rule must reconstruct the most likely true ranking. We argue that this is too stringent a requirement, and instead ask: How many votes does a voting rule need to reconstruct the true ranking? We define the family of pairwise-majority consistent rules, and show that for all rules in this family the number of samples required from the Mallows noise model is logarithmic in the number of alternatives, and that no rule can do asymptotically better (while some rules like plurality do much worse). Taking a more normative point of view, we consider voting rules that surely return the true ranking as the number of samples tends to infinity (we call this property accuracy in the limit); this allows us to move to a higher level of abstraction. We study families of noise models that are parametrized by distance functions, and find voting rules that are accurate in the limit for all noise models in such general families. We characterize the distance functions that induce noise models for which pairwise-majority consistent rules are accurate in the limit, and provide a similar result for another novel family of position-dominance consistent rules. These characterizations capture three well-known distance functions. We analyze the generalized Mallows model, a popular exponential model over rankings. Estimating the central (or consensus) ranking from data is NP-hard. We obtain the following new results: (1) We show that search methods can estimate both the central ranking pi0 and the model parameters theta exactly. The search is n! in the worst case, but is tractable when the true distribution is concentrated around its mode; (2) We show that the generalized Mallows model is jointly exponential in (pi0; theta), and introduce the conjugate prior for this model class; (3) The sufficient statistics are the pairwise marginal probabilities that item i is preferred to item j. Preliminary experiments confirm the theoretical predictions and compare the new algorithm and existing heuristics.