Robust ordinal regression in preference learning and ranking

Abstract

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. © 2013 The Author(s).