Top-k queries over uncertain scores

Modern recommendation systems leverage some forms of collaborative user or crowd sourced collection of information. For instance, services like TripAdvisor, Airbnb and HungyGoWhere rely on usergenerated content to describe and classify hotels, vacation rentals and restaurants. By nature of such independent collection of information, the multiplicity, diversity and varying quality of the information collected result in uncertainty. Objects, such as the services offered by hotels, vacation rentals and restaurants, have uncertain scores for their various features. In this context, ranking of uncertain data becomes a crucial issue. Several data models for uncertain data and several semantics for probabilistic top-k queries have been proposed in the literature. We consider here a model of objects with uncertain scores given as probability distributions and the semantics proposed by the state of the art reference work of Soliman, Hyas and Ben-David. In this paper, we explore the design space of Metropolis-Hastings Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for answering probabilistic top-k queries over a database of objects with uncertain scores. We are able to devise several algorithms that yield better performance than the reference algorithm.We empirically and comparatively prove the effectiveness and efficiency of these new algorithms.