  This paper proposes a new method for solving the well-known rank aggregation
problem from pairwise comparisons using the method of low-rank matrix
completion. The partial and noisy data of pairwise comparisons is transformed
into a matrix form. We then use tools from matrix completion, which has served
as a major component in the low-rank completion solution of the Netflix
challenge, to construct the preference of the different objects. In our
approach, the data of multiple comparisons is used to create an estimate of the
probability of object i to win (or be chosen) over object j, where only a
partial set of comparisons between N objects is known. The data is then
transformed into a matrix form for which the noiseless solution has a known
rank of one. An alternating minimization algorithm, in which the target matrix
takes a bilinear form, is then used in combination with maximum likelihood
estimation for both factors. The reconstructed matrix is used to obtain the
true underlying preference intensity. This work demonstrates the improvement of
our proposed algorithm over the current state-of-the-art in both simulated
scenarios and real data.
