In the common jury-contestant competition format, a jury consisting of multiple judges grade contestants on their performances to determine their ranking. Unlike in another common competition format where two contestants play a head-to-head match to produce the winner such as in football or basketball, the objectivity of judges are often called into question, potentially undermining the public's trust in the fairness of the competition. In this work we show, by modeling the jury-contestant competition format as a weighted bipartite network, how one can identify biased scores and how they impact the competition and its structure. Analyzing the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition of 2015 as an example with a well-publicized scoring controversy, we show that the presence of even a very small fraction of biased edges can gravely distort our inference of the network structure -in the example a single biased edge is shown to lead to an incorrect "solution" that also wrongly appears to be robust exclusively, dominating other reasonable solutions-highlighting the importance of bias detection and elimination in network inference. In the process our work also presents a modified modularity measure for the one-mode projection of weighted complete bipartite networks.
A common form of competition is one where judges grade contestants' performances which are then compiled to determine the final ranking of the contestants. Unlike in another common form of competition where two contestants play a head-to-head match to produce a winner as in football or basketball, the objectivity of judges are prone to be questioned, potentially undermining the public's trust in the fairness of the competition. In this work we show, by modeling the judge-contestant competition as a weighted bipartite network, how we can identify biased scores and measure their impact on our inference of the network structure. Analyzing the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition of 2015 with a well-publicized scoring controversy as an example, we show that even a single statistically uncharacteristic score can be enough to gravely distort our inference of the community structure, demonstrating the importance of detecting and eliminating biases. In the process we also find that there does not exist a significant system-wide bias of the judges based on the the race of the contestants.
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