On Rank Aggregation of Multiple Orderings in Network Design.pdfVIP

On Rank Aggregation of Multiple Orderings in Network Design Hadas Shachnai, Computer Science Dept., Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel Lisa Zhang, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, 600 Mountain Ave., Murray Hill, NJ 07974
Tomomi Matsui, Dept. of Information and System Engineering, Chuo University, Tokyo 112-8551, Japan  Abstract In the classic rank aggregation (RA) problem, we are given  input lists with potentially inconsistent orders of  elements; our goal is to find a single order of all elements that minimizes the total number of disagreements with the given orders. The problem is well known to be NP-hard, already for  . We consider a generalization of RA, where each list is associated with a set of orderings, and our goal is to choose one ordering per list and to find a permutation of the elements that minimizes the total disagreements with the chosen orderings. For the case in which the lists completely overlap, i.e. each list contains all  elements, we show that a simple Greedy algorithm yields a    -approximation for generalized RA. The case in which the lists only partially overlap, i.e. each list contains a subset of the  elements, is much harder to approximate. In fact, we show that RA with multiple orderings per list and partial overlaps cannot be approximated within any bounded ratio. Keywords: generalized rank aggregation, master ring, approximation algorithms 1. Introduction The problem of aggregating inconsistent information from many different sources arises in numerous contexts and disciplines. This includes the ancient problem of ranking a set of contestants or a set of alternatives based on possibly conflicting preferences, and the more recent problem of aggregating lists of Web pages output by different search engines (see, e.g., in [7]). Informally, the rank aggregation problem (RA) is defined as follows. Given  lists, each containing a permutation of the  elements, we seek a permutation  of the elements that has minimum tot