Pattern mining for label ranking

Preferences have always been present in many tasks in our daily lives. Buying the right car, choosing a suitable house or even deciding on the food to eat, are trivial examples of decisions that reveal information, explicitly or implicitly, about our preferences. The recent trend of collecting increasing amounts of data is also true for preference data. Extracting and modeling preferences can provide us with invaluable information about the choices of groups or individuals. In areas like e-commerce, which typically deal with decisions from thousands of users, the acquisition of preferences can be a difficult task. For these reasons, artificial intelligence (in particular, machine learning) methods have been increasingly important to the discovery and automatic learning of models about preferences. In this Ph.D. project, several approaches were analyzed and proposed to deal with the LR problem. Most of which has focused on pattern mining methods.Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

Entropy-based discretization methods for ranking data

Label Ranking (LR) problems are becoming increasingly important in Machine Learning. While there has been a significant amount of work on the development of learning algorithms for LR in recent years, there are not many pre-processing methods for LR. Some methods, like Naive Bayes for LR and APRIORI-LR, cannot handle real-valued data directly. Conventional discretization methods used in classification are not suitable for LR problems, due to the different target variable. In this work, we make an extensive analysis of the existing methods using simple approaches. We also propose a new method called EDiRa (Entropy-based Discretization for Ranking) for the discretization of ranking data. We illustrate the advantages of the method using synthetic data and also on several benchmark datasets. The results clearly indicate that the discretization is performing as expected and also improves the results and efficiency of the learning algorithms