Numerical variable reconstruction from ordinal categories based on probability distributions

Ordinal classification problems are an active research area in the machine learning community. Many previous works adapted state-of-art nominal classifiers to improve ordinal classification so that the method can take advantage of the ordinal structure of the dataset. However, these method improvements often rely upon a complex mathematical basis and they usually are attached to the training algorithm and model. This paper presents a novel method for generally adapting classification and regression models, such as artificial neural networks or support vector machines. The ordinal classification problem is reformulated as a regression problem by the reconstruction of a numerical variable which represents the different ordered class labels. Despite the simplicity and generality of the method, results are competitive in comparison with very specific methods for ordinal regression.