232 research outputs found
Preference Learning
This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 14101 “Preference Learning”. Preferences have recently received considerable attention in disciplines such as machine learning, knowledge discovery, information retrieval, statistics, social choice theory, multiple criteria decision making, decision under risk and uncertainty, operations research, and others. The motivation for this seminar was to showcase recent progress in these different areas with the goal of working towards a common basis of understanding, which should help to facilitate future synergies
Ranking Median Regression: Learning to Order through Local Consensus
This article is devoted to the problem of predicting the value taken by a
random permutation , describing the preferences of an individual over a
set of numbered items say, based on the observation of
an input/explanatory r.v. e.g. characteristics of the individual), when
error is measured by the Kendall distance. In the probabilistic
formulation of the 'Learning to Order' problem we propose, which extends the
framework for statistical Kemeny ranking aggregation developped in
\citet{CKS17}, this boils down to recovering conditional Kemeny medians of
given from i.i.d. training examples . For this reason, this statistical learning problem is
referred to as \textit{ranking median regression} here. Our contribution is
twofold. We first propose a probabilistic theory of ranking median regression:
the set of optimal elements is characterized, the performance of empirical risk
minimizers is investigated in this context and situations where fast learning
rates can be achieved are also exhibited. Next we introduce the concept of
local consensus/median, in order to derive efficient methods for ranking median
regression. The major advantage of this local learning approach lies in its
close connection with the widely studied Kemeny aggregation problem. From an
algorithmic perspective, this permits to build predictive rules for ranking
median regression by implementing efficient techniques for (approximate) Kemeny
median computations at a local level in a tractable manner. In particular,
versions of -nearest neighbor and tree-based methods, tailored to ranking
median regression, are investigated. Accuracy of piecewise constant ranking
median regression rules is studied under a specific smoothness assumption for
's conditional distribution given
Uncovering Randomness and Success in Society
An understanding of how individuals shape and impact the evolution of society
is vastly limited due to the unavailability of large-scale reliable datasets
that can simultaneously capture information regarding individual movements and
social interactions. We believe that the popular Indian film industry,
'Bollywood', can provide a social network apt for such a study. Bollywood
provides massive amounts of real, unbiased data that spans more than 100 years,
and hence this network has been used as a model for the present paper. The
nodes which maintain a moderate degree or widely cooperate with the other nodes
of the network tend to be more fit (measured as the success of the node in the
industry) in comparison to the other nodes. The analysis carried forth in the
current work, using a conjoined framework of complex network theory and random
matrix theory, aims to quantify the elements that determine the fitness of an
individual node and the factors that contribute to the robustness of a network.
The authors of this paper believe that the method of study used in the current
paper can be extended to study various other industries and organizations.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, 14 table
The application of visual saliency models in objective image quality assessment: a statistical evaluation
Advances in image quality assessment have shown the potential added value of including visual attention aspects in its objective assessment. Numerous models of visual saliency are implemented and integrated in different image quality metrics (IQMs), but the gain in reliability of the resulting IQMs varies to a large extent. The causes and the trends of this variation would be highly beneficial for further improvement of IQMs, but are not fully understood. In this paper, an exhaustive statistical evaluation is conducted to justify the added value of computational saliency in objective image quality assessment, using 20 state-of-the-art saliency models and 12 best-known IQMs. Quantitative results show that the difference in predicting human fixations between saliency models is sufficient to yield a significant difference in performance gain when adding these saliency models to IQMs. However, surprisingly, the extent to which an IQM can profit from adding a saliency model does not appear to have direct relevance to how well this saliency model can predict human fixations. Our statistical analysis provides useful guidance for applying saliency models in IQMs, in terms of the effect of saliency model dependence, IQM dependence, and image distortion dependence. The testbed and software are made publicly available to the research community
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