Beyond Kemeny Medians: Consensus Ranking Distributions Definition, Properties and Statistical Learning
This work addresses the challenge of consensus ranking in domains like social choice or recommendation systems, offering a novel method that is incremental in improving upon classical approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of summarizing ranking distributions beyond Kemeny medians by introducing consensus ranking distributions (CRDs) as sparse mixture models to approximate distributions with minimal distortion, and it proposes a tree-structured algorithm that efficiently learns these CRDs from data, supported by empirical experiments.
In this article we develop a new method for summarizing a ranking distribution, \textit{i.e.} a probability distribution on the symmetric group $\mathfrak{S}_n$, beyond the classical theory of consensus and Kemeny medians. Based on the notion of \textit{local ranking median}, we introduce the concept of \textit{consensus ranking distribution} ($\crd$), a sparse mixture model of Dirac masses on $\mathfrak{S}_n$, in order to approximate a ranking distribution with small distortion from a mass transportation perspective. We prove that by choosing the popular Kendall $τ$ distance as the cost function, the optimal distortion can be expressed as a function of pairwise probabilities, paving the way for the development of efficient learning methods that do not suffer from the lack of vector space structure on $\mathfrak{S}_n$. In particular, we propose a top-down tree-structured statistical algorithm that allows for the progressive refinement of a CRD based on ranking data, from the Dirac mass at a Kemeny median at the root of the tree to the empirical ranking data distribution itself at the end of the tree's exhaustive growth. In addition to the theoretical arguments developed, the relevance of the algorithm is empirically supported by various numerical experiments.