Proposal of an efficient rank-ordering method based on subjectivity

An effective method to evaluate order relations based on subjectivity is proposed. This method is a kind of relative evaluation method and adopts “quicksort,” which is to be the fastest sorting algorithm, to reduce the number of comparisons and the time of evaluation, so that the method has light burden on subjects. Therefore it is expected that the evaluation criteria of subjects do not fluctuate during evaluation. We test the validity and effectiveness of the method through an experiment. In the experiment, subjects evaluate order relations of five landscape photographs about preference using the proposal method and pairwise comparison method. The experimental result shows that there is a strong correlation between order relations obtained by both of methods. We conclude that the proposal method is effective to evaluate order relation about preference of photograph. Additionally, it is suggested that the same thing applies to other kinds of subjective criteria.