Ranking and synchronization from pairwise measurements via SVD
This work addresses ranking and synchronization tasks in domains like sports analytics and distributed systems, presenting an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of recovering an unknown signal from noisy pairwise difference measurements, with applications in sports ranking and network synchronization, by proposing an SVD-based algorithm that shows competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods in theoretical robustness and numerical experiments.
Given a measurement graph $G= (V,E)$ and an unknown signal $r \in \mathbb{R}^n$, we investigate algorithms for recovering $r$ from pairwise measurements of the form $r_i - r_j$; $\{i,j\} \in E$. This problem arises in a variety of applications, such as ranking teams in sports data and time synchronization of distributed networks. Framed in the context of ranking, the task is to recover the ranking of $n$ teams (induced by $r$) given a small subset of noisy pairwise rank offsets. We propose a simple SVD-based algorithmic pipeline for both the problem of time synchronization and ranking. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis in terms of robustness against both sampling sparsity and noise perturbations with outliers, using results from matrix perturbation and random matrix theory. Our theoretical findings are complemented by a detailed set of numerical experiments on both synthetic and real data, showcasing the competitiveness of our proposed algorithms with other state-of-the-art methods.