A Signal Processing Approach to Fourier Analysis of Ranking Data: The Importance of Phase

作者：Kakarala Ramakrishna^*

来源：IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 2011, 59(4): 1518-1527.

DOI：10.1109/TSP.2010.2104145

• Fourier transform
• ranking data
• phase
• symmetric group

Ranking data is a type of data obtained in some elections, in customer surveys, as well as from web search results. Such data may be considered as a type of signal defined on the group of permutations of objects, denoted. There exists a Fourier transform for obtained from group representation theory, which is well known in the mathematics literature. However, previous work has not approached the transform from a signal processing perspective: in particular, there is no discussion of what constitutes "magnitude" and "phase," nor any analysis of what phase information might tell us beyond a well-known connection to group translation. This paper explores the properties of the phase spectrum of ranking data; in particular, a novel contribution is the formulation of the bispectrum for ranking data, which may be used for studying phase linearity. Analysis of two well-known ranking data sets shows that they are surprisingly well fit by linear phase approximations.

• 出版日期2011-4
• 单位南阳理工学院