A neural network approach to ordinal regression

Abstract

Ordinal regression is an important type of learning, which has properties of both classification and regression. Here we describe an effective approach to adapt a traditional neural network to learn ordinal categories. Our approach is a generalization of the perceptron method for ordinal regression. On several benchmark datasets, our method (NNRank) outperforms a neural network classification method. Compared with the ordinal regression methods using Gaussian processes and support vector machines, NNRank achieves comparable performance. Moreover, NNRank has the advantages of traditional neural networks: learning in both online and batch modes, handling very large training datasets, and making rapid predictions. These features make NNRank a useful and complementary tool for large-scale data mining tasks such as information retrieval, web page ranking, collaborative filtering, and protein ranking in Bioinformatics. The neural network software is available at: http://www.cs.missouri.edu/~chengji/cheng_software.html. ©2008 IEEE.