Preference learning: An introduction

Abstract

This introduction gives a brief overview of the field of preference learning and, along the way, tries to establish a unified terminology. Special emphasis will be put on learning to rank, which is by now one of the most extensively studied problem tasks in preference learning and also prominently represented in this book. We propose a categorization of ranking problems into object ranking, instance ranking, and label ranking. Moreover, we introduce these scenarios in a formal way, discuss different ways in which the learning of ranking functions can be approached, and explain how the contributions collected in this book relate to this categorization. Finally, we also highlight some important applications of preference learning methods. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.