The Analysis of Ranking Data Using Score Functions and Penalized Likelihood

In this paper, we consider different score functions in order summarize certain characteristics for one and two sample ranking data sets. Our approach is flexible and is based on embedding the nonparametric problem in a parametric framework. We make use of the von Mises-Fisher distribution to approximate the normalizing constant in our model. In order to gain further insight in the data, we make use of penalized likelihood to narrow down the number of items where the rankers differ. We applied our method on various real life data sets and we conclude that our methodology is consistent with the data.