# Invidious Comparisons: Ranking and Selection as Compound Decisions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.12550 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12550/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Solving Empirical Bayes via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09844/) (2025)
- [Prompt-Dependent Ranking of Large Language Models with Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03336/) (2026)
- [A New Perspective On Denoising Based On Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08135/) (2023)
- [Ranking by Lifts: A Cost-Benefit Approach to Large-Scale A/B Tests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01036/) (2024)
- [Polylogarithmic Sparsity of Randomly Reweighted NPMLEs for Gaussian Mixtures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01088/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There is an innate human tendency, one might call it the "league table mentality," to construct rankings. Schools, hospitals, sports teams, movies, and myriad other objects are ranked even though their inherent multi-dimensionality would suggest that -- at best -- only partial orderings were possible. We consider a large class of elementary ranking problems in which we observe noisy, scalar measurements of merit for n objects of potentially heterogeneous precision and are asked to select a group of the objects that are "most meritorious." The problem is naturally formulated in the compound decision framework of Robbins's (1956) empirical Bayes theory, but it also exhibits close connections to the recent literature on multiple testing. The nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator for mixture models (Kiefer and Wolfowitz (1956)) is employed to construct optimal ranking and selection rules. Performance of the rules is evaluated in simulations and an application to ranking U.S kidney dialysis centers.