A review on instance ranking problems in statistical learning

Abstract

AbstractRanking problems, also known as preference learning problems, define a widely spread class of statistical learning problems with many applications, including fraud detection, document ranking, medicine, chemistry, credit risk screening, image ranking or media memorability. While there already exist reviews concentrating on specific types of ranking problems like label and object ranking problems, there does not yet seem to exist an overview concentrating on instance ranking problems that both includes developments in distinguishing between different types of instance ranking problems as well as careful discussions about their differences and the applicability of the existing ranking algorithms to them. In instance ranking, one explicitly takes the responses into account with the goal to infer a scoring function which directly maps feature vectors to real-valued ranking scores, in contrast to object ranking problems where the ranks are given as preference information with the goal to learn a permutation. In this article, we systematically review different types of instance ranking problems and the corresponding loss functions resp. goodness criteria. We discuss the difficulties when trying to optimize those criteria. As for a detailed and comprehensive overview of existing machine learning techniques to solve such ranking problems, we systematize existing techniques and recapitulate the corresponding optimization problems in a unified notation. We also discuss to which of the instance ranking problems the respective algorithms are tailored and identify their strengths and limitations. Computational aspects and open research problems are also considered.