Abstract Label ranking aims to learn a mapping from instances to rankings over a finite number of predefined labels. Random forest is a powerful and one of the most successful general-purpose machine learning algorithms of modern times. In this paper, we present a powerful random forest label ranking method which uses random decision trees to retrieve nearest neighbors. We have developed a novel two-step rank aggregation strategy to effectively aggregate neighboring rankings discovered by the random forest into a final predicted ranking. Compared with existing methods, the new random forest method has many advantages including its intrinsically scalable tree data structure, highly parallel-able computational architecture and much superior performance. We present extensive experimental results to demonstrate that our new method achieves the highly competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods for datasets with complete ranking and datasets with only partial ranking information.
One is known as reduction approaches which transform the label ranking problem into several simpler binary classification problems, and then the solutions of these classification problems are combined into a predicted ranking. Label ranking by learning pairwise preferences and by learning utility functions are two widely used schemes in the reduction approaches. For example, ranking by pairwise comparison (RPC) learns binary models for each pair of labels, and the predictions of these binary models are then aggregated into a ranking @cite_8 ; while constraint classification (CC) and log-linear models for label ranking (LL) seek to learn linear utility functions for each individual label instead of preference relations for each pair of labels @cite_29 @cite_31 .
@cite_29 @cite_31 @cite_8
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We study the problem of label ranking, a machine learning task that consists of inducing a mapping from instances to rankings over a finite number of labels. Our learning method, referred to as ranking by pairwise comparison (RPC), first induces pairwise order relations (preferences) from suitable training data, using a natural extension of so-called pairwise classification. A ranking is then derived from a set of such relations by means of a ranking procedure. In this paper, we first elaborate on a key advantage of such a decomposition, namely the fact that it allows the learner to adapt to different loss functions without re-training, by using different ranking procedures on the same predicted order relations. In this regard, we distinguish between two types of errors, called, respectively, ranking error and position error. Focusing on the position error, which has received less attention so far, we then propose a ranking procedure called ranking through iterated choice as well as an efficient pairwise implementation thereof. Apart from a theoretical justification of this procedure, we offer empirical evidence in favor of its superior performance as a risk minimizer for the position error. Preference learning is an emerging topic that appears in different guises in the recent literature. This work focuses on a particular learning scenario called label ranking, where the problem is to learn a mapping from instances to rankings over a finite number of labels. Our approach for learning such a mapping, called ranking by pairwise comparison (RPC), first induces a binary preference relation from suitable training data using a natural extension of pairwise classification. A ranking is then derived from the preference relation thus obtained by means of a ranking procedure, whereby different ranking methods can be used for minimizing different loss functions. In particular, we show that a simple (weighted) voting strategy minimizes risk with respect to the well-known Spearman rank correlation. We compare RPC to existing label ranking methods, which are based on scoring individual labels instead of comparing pairs of labels. Both empirically and theoretically, it is shown that RPC is superior in terms of computational efficiency, and at least competitive in terms of accuracy. We consider Multiclass and Multilabel classification with extremely large number of classes, of which only few are labeled to each instance. In such setting, standard methods that have training, prediction cost linear to the number of classes become intractable. State-of-the-art methods thus aim to reduce the complexity by exploiting correlation between labels under assumption that the similarity between labels can be captured by structures such as low-rank matrix or balanced tree. However, as the diversity of labels increases in the feature space, structural assumption can be easily violated, which leads to degrade in the testing performance. In this work, we show that a margin-maximizing loss with l1 penalty, in case of Extreme Classification, yields extremely sparse solution both in primal and in dual without sacrificing the expressive power of predictor. We thus propose a Fully-Corrective Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe (FC-BCFW) algorithm that exploits both primal and dual sparsity to achieve a complexity sublinear to the number of primal and dual variables. A bi-stochastic search method is proposed to further improve the efficiency. In our experiments on both Multiclass and Multilabel problems, the proposed method achieves significant higher accuracy than existing approaches of Extreme Classification with very competitive training and prediction time. The essence of distantly supervised relation extraction is that it is an incomplete multi-label classification problem with sparse and noisy features. To tackle the sparsity and noise challenges, we propose solving the classification problem using matrix completion on factorized matrix of minimized rank. We formulate relation classification as completing the unknown labels of testing items (entity pairs) in a sparse matrix that concatenates training and testing textual features with training labels. Our algorithmic framework is based on the assumption that the rank of item-by-feature and item-by-label joint matrix is low. We apply two optimization models to recover the underlying low-rank matrix leveraging the sparsity of feature-label matrix. The matrix completion problem is then solved by the fixed point continuation (FPC) algorithm, which can find the global optimum. Experiments on two widely used datasets with different dimensions of textual features demonstrate that our low-rank matrix completion approach significantly outperforms the baseline and the state-of-the-art methods.