1. A computer implemented method of identifying and ranking preferences regarding a plurality of interests, for a given group of users, the method comprising: obtaining from one or more data sources, a reference ranking based on user preference information including partial preference information for the given group of users, wherein the partial preference information includes a set of inferred interest preferences based on pairwise comparisons of items selected by users in the given group and other items that were not selected by the users in the group; analyzing, by operation of one or more server computers, the pairwise comparisons including, iteratively reordering the reference rankings based on various insertion vectors to generate a distribution to learn one or more statistical models for inferring and ranking a set of preferences for the given group of users based on partial preference information; and generating a recommendation for at least one of the users in the given group of users based on the one or more statistical models.