Knowledge about Ranking Algorithms

1. Type

Most current ranking algorithms can be divided into three main categories: pointwise, pairwise and listwise.

Pointwise ranking algorithms
This type of algorithms does not use any relative information between documents, instead attempting to design a score function, scores of which are then used to rank the documents.

Examples: PRank

Pairwise ranking algorithms
The goal of these algorithms is to minimize the relative pairwise misclassification error in ranking problem.

Examples: RankNet, LambdaRank, RankBoost

Listwise ranking algorithms
These algorithms use lists of ranked documents as “instances” during training, and learn a ranking model by minimizing some listwise loss function.

Examples: AdaRank, SoftRank, ListNet, C-CRF

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