Survey on Rank Aggregation Methods

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "Survey on Rank Aggregation Methods"

Miss Qiong Fang


Abstract:

To aggregate a set of rankings and produce a "consensus" ranking is known
as the problem of rank aggregation. Rank aggregation arises in many
applications of various disciplines, such like candidate voting in social
science, web search and database query in computer science, seriation in
paleontology, and etc.  Different applications may lead to rank
aggregation problems with different settings, and under some settings, no
satisfying rank aggregation methods have been found yet. In addition, the
fundamental issue of rank aggregation is concerned with the aggregation
rules. Some aggregation rules can ensure the generation of the aggregated
rankings with desirable properties. However, the corresponding rank
aggregation problems may be quite complicated, even NP-hard.

In this report, we classify current rank aggregation applications into
four cat- egories based on their problem settings. For each category,
representative rank aggregation methods are reviewed with the focus on
analyzing the performance with respect to the aggregation rules. Last, a
few potential research problems are listed as our future work.


Date:     		Wednesday, 27 August 2008

Time:                   10:00a.m.-12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3501
			lifts 25-26

Committee Members:      Dr. Wilfred Ng (Supervisor)
			Prof. Dimitris Papadias (Chairperson)
			Dr. Wang-Chien Lee
			Dr. Ke Yi


**** ALL are Welcome ****