Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

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.