Sync-Rank: Robust Ranking, Constrained Ranking and Rank Aggregation via Eigenvector and Semidefinite Programming Synchronization

Abstract. We consider the classic problem of establishing a statistical ranking of a set of n items given a set of inconsistent and incomplete pairwise comparisons between such items. Instantiations of this problem occur in numerous applications in data analysis (e.g., ranking teams in sports data), computer vision, and machine learning. We formulate the above problem of ranking with incomplete noisy information as an instance of the group synchronization problem over the group SO(2) of planar rotations, whose usefulness has been demonstrated in numerous applications in recent years in computer vision and graphics, sensor network localization and structural biology. Its least squares solution can be approximated by either a spectral or a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation, followed by a rounding procedure. We show extensive numerical simulations on both synthetic and real-world data sets (Premier League soccer games, a Halo 2 game tournament and NCAA College Basketball games), which show that our proposed method compares favorably to other ranking methods from the recent literature. Existing theoretical guarantees on the group synchronization problem imply lower bounds on the largest amount of noise permissible in the data while still achieving exact recovery of the ground truth ranking. We propose a similar synchronization-based algorithm for the rank-aggregation problem, which integrates in a globally consistent ranking many pairwise rank-offsets or partial rankings, given by different rating systems on the same set of items, an approach which yields significantly more accurate results than other aggregation methods, including Rank-Centrality, a recent state-of-the-art algorithm. Furthermore, we discuss the problem of semi-supervised ranking when there is available information on the ground truth rank of a subset of players, and propose an algorithm based on SDP which is able to recover the ranking of the remaining players, subject to such hard constraints. Finally, synchronization-based ranking, combined with a spectral technique for the densest subgraph problem, makes it possible to extract locally-consistent partial rankings, in other words, to identify the rank of a small subset of players whose pairwise rank comparisons are less noisy than the rest of the data, which other methods are not able to identify. We discuss a number of related open questions and variations of the ranking problem in other settings, which we defer for future investigation.