Mixture models for analysing ranking data on sport preferences

The contribution considers a class of mixture models able to interpret empirical evidence about the relationships among motivations, respondents' characteristics and expressed evaluations on the preferred sports. The approach examines and compares the uncertainty of the answers and the feeling towards the sports by accounting for emph{inflated} categories. Specifically, a new mixture model for dealing with two modal values at the extreme categories is introduced based on a distribution for rank data. After a brief review of the methods, the proposal is discussed on the basis of a survey on sports ranking.