Robust ordinal regression in preference learning and ranking

Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA) offers a diversity of approaches designed for providing the decision maker (DM) with a recommendation concerning a set of alternatives (items, actions) evaluated from multiple points of view, called criteria. This paper aims at drawing attention of the Machine Learning (ML) community upon recent advances in a representative MCDA methodology, called Robust Ordinal Regression (ROR). ROR learns by examples in order to rank a set of alternatives, thus considering a similar problem as Preference Learning (ML-PL) does. However, ROR implements the interactive preference construction paradigm, which should be perceived as a mutual learning of the model and the DM. The paper clarifies the specific interpretation of the concept of preference learning adopted in ROR and MCDA, comparing it to the usual concept of preference learning considered within ML. This comparison concerns a structure of the considered problem, types of admitted preference information, a character of the employed preference models, ways of exploiting them, and techniques to arrive at a final ranking

Preference disaggregation for measuring and analysing customer satisfaction: The MUSA method.

Abstract The multicriteria method MUSA (MUlticriteria Satisfaction Analysis) for measuring and analysing customer satisfaction is presented in this paper. The MUSA method is a preference disaggregation model following the principles of ordinal regression analysis (inference procedure). The integrated methodology evaluates the satisfaction level of a set of individuals (customers, employees, etc.) based on their values and expressed preferences. Using satisfaction survey's data, the MUSA method aggregates the different preferences in unique satisfaction functions. This aggregationdisaggregation process is achieved with the minimum possible errors. The main advantage of the MUSA method is that it fully considers the qualitative form of customers' judgements and preferences. The development of a set of quantitative indices and perceptual maps makes possible the provision of an effective support for the satisfaction evaluation problem. The paper also presents the reliability analysis of the provided results, along with a simple numerical example that demonstrates the implementation process of the MUSA method. Finally, several extensions and future research in the context of the presented method are discussed

A Personalized Location Aware Multi-Criteria Recommender System Based on Context-Aware User Preference Models

Part 2: Data MiningInternational audienceRecommender Systems have been applied in a large number of domains. However, current approaches rarely consider multiple criteria or the level of mobility and location of a user. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm to construct personalized multi-criteria Recommender Systems. Our algorithm incorporates the user’s current context, and techniques from the Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis field of study to model user preferences. The obtained preference model is used to assess the utility of each item, to then recommend the items with the highest utility. The criteria considered when creating preference models are the user location, mobility level and user profile. The latter is obtained considering the user requirements, and generalizing the user data from a large-scale demographic database. The evaluation of our algorithm shows that our system accurately identifies the demographic groups where a user may belong, and generates highly accurate recommendations that match his/her preference value scale