Learning shared rankings from mixtures of noisy pairwise comparisons

We propose a novel model for rank aggregation from pairwise comparisons which accounts for a heterogeneous population of inconsistent users whose preferences are different mixtures of multiple shared ranking schemes. By connecting this problem to recent advances in the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) literature, we develop an algorithm that can learn the underlying shared rankings with provable statistical and computational efficiency guarantees. We validate the approach using semi-synthetic and real world datasets.