by Rémi Coulom
Whole-History Rating (WHR) is a new method to estimate the time-varying strengths of players involved in paired comparisons. Like many variations of the Elo rating system, the whole-history approach is based on the dynamic Bradley-Terry model. But, instead of using incremental approximations, WHR directly computes the exact maximum a posteriori over the whole rating history of all players. This additional accuracy comes at a higher computational cost than traditional methods, but computation is still fast enough to be easily applied in real time to large-scale game servers (a new game is added in less than 0.001 second). Experiments demonstrate that, in comparison to Elo, Glicko, TrueSkill, and decayed-history algorithms, WHR produces better predictions.
@inproceedings{
Coulom-2008a,
author = "R\'emi Coulom",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer and Games",
editor = "van den Herik, H. Jaap and Xu, Xinhe and Ma, Zhongmin",
title = "Whole-History Rating: A {Bayesian} Rating System for Players of Time-Varying Strength",
publisher = "Springer",
series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
volume = 5131,
address = "Beijing, China",
month = oct,
year = 2008,
pages = "113--124"
}