A preference model for structured supervised learning tasks

The preference model introduced in this paper gives a natural framework and a principled solution for a broad class of supervised learning problems with structured predictions, such as predicting orders (label and instance ranking), and predicting rates (classification and ordinal regression). We show how all these problems can be cast as linear problems in an augmented space, and we propose an on-line method to efficiently solve them. Experiments on an ordinal regression task confirm the effectiveness of the approach.