Title
Antithetic and Monte Carlo kernel estimators for partial rankings.
Abstract
In the modern age, rankings data are ubiquitous and they are useful for a variety of applications such as recommender systems, multi-object tracking and preference learning. However, most rankings data encountered in the real world are incomplete, which prevent the direct application of existing modelling tools for complete rankings. Our contribution is a novel way to extend kernel methods for complete rankings to partial rankings, via consistent Monte Carlo estimators for Gram matrices: matrices of kernel values between pairs of observations. We also present a novel variance-reduction scheme based on an antithetic variate construction between permutations to obtain an improved estimator for the Mallows kernel. The corresponding antithetic kernel estimator has lower variance, and we demonstrate empirically that it has a better performance in a variety of machine learning tasks. Both kernel estimators are based on extending kernel mean embeddings to the embedding of a set of full rankings consistent with an observed partial ranking. They form a computationally tractable alternative to previous approaches for partial rankings data. An overview of the existing kernels and metrics for permutations is also provided.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/s11222-019-09859-z
Statistics and Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Reproducing kernel Hilbert space, Partial rankings, Monte Carlo, Antithetic variates, Gram matrix
Kernel (linear algebra),Mathematical optimization,Random variate,Ranking,Permutation,Algorithm,Preference learning,Kernel method,Variance reduction,Mathematics,Estimator
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
abs/1807.00400
5
0960-3174
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
16
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lomeli, Maria1102.23
Mark Rowland2112.92
Arthur Gretton33638226.18
Zoubin Ghahramani4104551264.39