A Topic Modeling Approach to Rank Aggregation

We propose a new model for rank aggregation from pairwise comparisons that captures both ranking heterogeneity across users and ranking inconsistency for each user. We establish a formal statistical equivalence between the new model and topic models. We leverage recent advances in the topic modeling literature to develop an algorithm that can learn shared latent rankings with provable statistical and computational efficiency guarantees. The method is also shown to empirically outperform competing approaches on some semi-synthetic and real world datasets.