Algorithm For Ranking Items

You can replace each attribute-vector x (of length N = 6500) by the z-score of the vector Z(x), where

Z(x) = (x - mean(x))/sd(x).

This would transform them into the same "scale", and then you can add up the Z-scores (with equal weights) to get a final score, and rank the N=6500 items by this total score. If you can find in your problem some other attribute-vector that would be an indicator of "goodness" (say the 10-day return of the security?), then you could fit a regression model of this predicted attribute against these z-scored variables, to figure out the best non-uniform weights.


Start each item with a score of 0. For each of the 5 numbers, sort the list by that number and add each item's ranking in that sorting to its score. Then, just sort the items by the combined score.


The reason people are having trouble answering this question is we have no way of comparing two different "attributes". If there were just two attributes, say quantity traded and median price spread, would (20million,50%) be worse or better than (100,1%)? Only you can decide this.

Converting everything into the same size numbers could help, this is what is known as "normalisation". A good way of doing this is the z-score which Prasad mentions. This is a statistical concept, looking at how the quantity varies. You need to make some assumptions about the statistical distributions of your numbers to use this.

Things like spreads are probably normally distributed - shaped like a normal distribution. For these, as Prasad says, take z(spread) = (spread-mean(spreads))/standardDeviation(spreads).

Things like the quantity traded might be a Power law distribution. For these you might want to take the log() before calculating the mean and sd. That is the z score is z(qty) = (log(qty)-mean(log(quantities)))/sd(log(quantities)).

Then just add up the z-score for each attribute.

To do this for each attribute you will need to have an idea of its distribution. You could guess but the best way is plot a graph and have a look. You might also want to plot graphs on log scales. See wikipedia for a long list.