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Beyond rankings: comparing directed acyclic graphs

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Abstract

Defining appropriate distance measures among rankings is a classic area of study which has led to many useful applications. In this paper, we propose a more general abstraction of preference data, namely directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and introduce a measure for comparing DAGs, given that a vertex correspondence between the DAGs is known. We study the properties of this measure and use it to aggregate and cluster a set of DAGs. We show that these problems are \(\mathbf {NP}\)-hard and present efficient methods to obtain solutions with approximation guarantees. In addition to preference data, these methods turn out to have other interesting applications, such as the analysis of a collection of information cascades in a network. We test the methods on synthetic and real-world datasets, showing that the methods can be used to, e.g., find a set of influential individuals related to a set of topics in a network or to discover meaningful and occasionally surprising clustering structure.

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Notes

  1. Most often the Kendall-tau distance is defined to be a value between 0 and 1 by normalizing with the total number of vertex pairs \({{|V|} \atopwithdelims ()2}\).

  2. The dataset can be downloaded at http://users.ics.aalto.fi/emalmi/artist_preference_data.zip.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Nicola Barbieri for providing the Last.fm dataset. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. This work was supported by Academy of Finland grant 118653 (ALGODAN).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. HIIT and Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Eric Malmi, Nikolaj Tatti & Aristides Gionis

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  1. Eric Malmi
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  2. Nikolaj Tatti
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  3. Aristides Gionis
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Correspondence to Eric Malmi.

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Responsible editors: Joao Gama, Indre Zliobaite, Alipio Jorge, Concha Bielza.

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Malmi, E., Tatti, N. & Gionis, A. Beyond rankings: comparing directed acyclic graphs. Data Min Knowl Disc 29, 1233–1257 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-015-0406-1

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