Preference Learning——Introduction

Introduction

preference learning refers to the problem of learning from observations which reveal, either explicitly or implicitly information about the preferences of an individual (e.g., a user of a computer system) or a class of individuals;the acquisition of this kind of information can be supported by methods for preference mining.

Preference learning is about inducing predictive preference models from empirical data.

Special emphasis will be put on learning to rank, which is by now one of the most extensively studied problem tasks in preference learning

• AI通过处理偏好为知识表示与推理领域的研究提供了定性和象征性的方法以此来弥补传统的方法。这在 economic decision
  theory领域已经研究了好久了。
• 偏好学习的训练数据通常不会是完整的信息而是一些更一般形式的信息，比如相对偏好信息或者不同种类的间接反馈和隐式偏好信息。

Preference Learning Tasks

• 偏好学习任务（Preference Learning Tasks）：
  
  • 包括一个偏好已知的一组数据
  • 学到一个函数能预测新数据的偏好

terminology

A data object consists of an instance (the input, also called predictive or independent variable in statistics)and an associated class label (the output, also called target or dependent variable in statistics). The former is normally denoted by x, and the corresponding instance space by X , while the output space is denoted by Y.

• 注意此处的实例instance是一个向量，同时其对应的类标签class label 也是一个向量。区别于在分类问题中我们遇到的类标签是一个变量。

  

学习排名（learning to rank）是偏好学习（Preference Learning）中最受瞩目的一个主题。简单介绍下几种排名问题：

Label Ranking

• Input:
  
  • Given an instance space X
  • Given a finite set of labels Y = {y1,y2…yk}.
• output: