Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the fundamental problems in the theory of social choice is aggregating the rankings of a set of agents (or voters) into a consensus ranking. Rank aggregation has found application in a variety of computational contexts. However, the goal of constructing a consensus ranking rather than, say, a single outcome (or winner) is often left unjustified, calling into question the suitability of classical rank aggregation methods. We introduce a novel model which offers a decision-theoretic motivation for constructing a consensus ranking. Our unavailable candidate model assumes that a consensus choice must be made, but that candidates may become unavailable after voters express their preferences. Roughly speaking, a consensus ranking serves as a compact, easily communicable representation of a decision policy that can be used to make choices in the face of uncertain candidate availability. We use this model to define a principled aggregation method that minimizes expected voter dissatisfaction with the chosen candidate. We give exact and approximation algorithms for computing optimal rankings and provide computational evidence for the effectiveness of a simple greedy scheme. We also describe strong connections to popular voting protocols such as the plurality rule and the Kemeny consensus, showing specifically that Kemeny produces optimal rankings in the unavailable candidate model under certain conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".