Aggregated statistical rankings are arbitrary

Deanna B. Haunsperger

Social Choice and Welfare, 2003, vol. 20, issue 2, 272 pages

Abstract: In many areas of mathematics, statistics, and the social sciences, the intriguing, and somewhat unsettling, paradox occurs where the “parts” may give rise to a common decision, but the aggregate of those parts, the “whole”, gives rise to a different decision. The Kruskal-Wallis nonparametric statistical test on n samples which can be used to rank-order a list of alternatives is subject to such a Simpson-like paradox of aggregation. That is, two or more data sets each may individually support a certain ordering of the samples under Kruskal-Wallis, yet their union, or aggregate, yields a different outcome. An analysis of this phenomenon yields a computable criterion which characterizes which matrices of ranked data, when aggregated, can give rise to such a paradox. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003

Date: 2003
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DOI: 10.1007/s003550200179

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