On discovering bucket orders from preference data

Abstract

The problem of ordering a set of entities which contain inherent ties among them arises in many applications. Notion of "bucket order" has emerged as a popular mechanism of ranking in such settings. A bucket order is an ordered partition of the set of entities into "buckets". There is a total order on the buckets, but the entities within a bucket are treated as tied. In this paper, we focus on discovering bucket order from data captured in the form of user preferences. We consider two settings: one in which the discrepancies in the input preferences are "local" (when collected from experts) and the other in which discrepancies could be arbitrary (when collected from a large population). We present a formal model to capture the setting of local discrepancies and consider the following question: "how many experts need to be queried to discover the underlying bucket order on n entities?". We prove an upperbound of O(√logn). In the case of arbitrary discrepancies, we model it as the bucket order problem of discovering a bucket order that best fits the data (captured as pairwise preference statistics). We present a new approach which exploits a connection between the discovery of buckets and the correlation clustering problem. We present empirical evaluation of our algorithms on real and artificially generated datasets. Copyright © SIAM.