Who is the Winning Algorithm? Rank Aggregation for Comparative Studies

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Painsky, Amichai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Painsky, Amichai
author_facet Painsky, Amichai
contents Consider a collection of m competing machine learning algorithms. Given their performance on a benchmark of datasets, we would like to identify the best performing algorithm. Specifically, which algorithm is most likely to ``win'' (rank highest) on a future, unseen dataset. The standard maximum likelihood approach suggests counting the number of wins per each algorithm. In this work, we argue that there is much more information in the complete rankings. That is, the number of times that each algorithm finished second, third and so forth. Yet, it is not entirely clear how to effectively utilize this information for our purpose. In this work we introduce a novel conceptual framework for estimating the win probability for each of the m algorithms, given their complete rankings over a benchmark of datasets. Our proposed framework significantly improves upon currently known methods in synthetic and real-world examples.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_01664
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Who is the Winning Algorithm? Rank Aggregation for Comparative Studies
Painsky, Amichai
Machine Learning
Consider a collection of m competing machine learning algorithms. Given their performance on a benchmark of datasets, we would like to identify the best performing algorithm. Specifically, which algorithm is most likely to ``win'' (rank highest) on a future, unseen dataset. The standard maximum likelihood approach suggests counting the number of wins per each algorithm. In this work, we argue that there is much more information in the complete rankings. That is, the number of times that each algorithm finished second, third and so forth. Yet, it is not entirely clear how to effectively utilize this information for our purpose. In this work we introduce a novel conceptual framework for estimating the win probability for each of the m algorithms, given their complete rankings over a benchmark of datasets. Our proposed framework significantly improves upon currently known methods in synthetic and real-world examples.
title Who is the Winning Algorithm? Rank Aggregation for Comparative Studies
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01664