A Hyper-surface Arrangement Model of Ranking Distributions

A distribution on the permutations over a fixed finite set is called a ranking distribution. Modelling ranking distributions is one of the major topics in preference learning as such distributions appear as the ranking data produced by many judges. In this paper, we propose a geometric model for ranking distributions. Our idea is to use hyper-surface arrangements in a metric space as the representation space, where each component cut out by hyper-surfaces corresponds to a total ordering, and its volume is proportional to the probability. In this setting, the union of components corresponds to a partial ordering and its probability is also estimated by the volume. Similarly, the probability of a partial ordering conditioned by another partial ordering is estimated by the ratio of volumes. We provide a simple iterative algorithm to fit our model to a given dataset. We show our model can represent the distribution of a real-world dataset faithfully and can be used for prediction and visualisation purposes.