- Series
- Stochastics Seminar
- Time
- Thursday, January 9, 2020 - 3:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 006
- Speaker
- Cheng Mao – Georgia Institute of Technology – cmao35@gatech.edu – https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cmao35/
- Organizer
- Michael Damron
In various applications involving ranking data, statistical models for mixtures of permutations are frequently employed when the population exhibits heterogeneity. In this talk, I will discuss the widely used Mallows mixture model. I will introduce a generic polynomial-time algorithm that learns a mixture of permutations from groups of pairwise comparisons. This generic algorithm, equipped with a specialized subroutine, demixes the Mallows mixture with a sample complexity that improves upon the previous state of the art.