Match prediction from group comparison data using neural networks

We explore the match prediction problem where one seeks to estimate the likelihood of a group of M items preferred over another, based on partial group comparison data. Challenges arise in practice. As existing state-of-the-art algorithms are tailored to certain statistical models, we have different best algorithms across distinct scenarios. Worse yet, we have no prior knowledge on the underlying model for a given scenario. These call for a unified approach that can be universally applied to a wide range of scenarios and achieve consistently high performances. To this end, we incorporate deep learning architectures so as to reflect the key structural features that most state-of-the-art algorithms, some of which are optimal in certain settings, share in common. This enables us to infer hidden models underlying a given dataset, which govern in-group interactions and statistical patterns of comparisons, and hence to devise the best algorithm tailored to the dataset at hand. Through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, we evaluate our framework in comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms. It turns out that our framework consistently leads to the best performance across all datasets in terms of cross entropy loss and prediction accuracy, while the state-of-the-art algorithms suffer from inconsistent performances across different datasets. Furthermore, we show that it can be easily extended to attain satisfactory performances in rank aggregation tasks, suggesting that it can be adaptable for other tasks as well.