On the Use of Partially Ordered Observations in Measuring the Support for a Complete Order

Abstract

A random experiment which results in some ordering of the M events E ₁, E ₂, ···, E _M may be such that these events are observable not individually, but in the form of ordered subsets. A discussion is given for the partial order problem of determining information about one or more complete orders of the M events from partially ordered observations. Relationships are mentioned between the (rank-order) methods of the present paper and those of Rank Correlation and the k-sample problem.