Multilabel Ranking with Inconsistent Rankers

While most existing multilabel ranking methods assume the availability of a single objective label ranking for each instance in the training set, this paper deals with a more common case where subjective inconsistent rankings from multiple rankers are associated with each instance. The key idea is to learn a latent preference distribution for each instance. The proposed method mainly includes two steps. The first step is to generate a common preference distribution that is most compatible to all the personal rankings. The second step is to learn a mapping from the instances to the preference distributions. The proposed preference distribution learning (PDL) method is applied to the problem of multilabel ranking for natural scene images. Experimental results show that PDL can effectively incorporate the information given by the inconsistent rankers, and perform remarkably better than the compared state-of-the-art multilabel ranking algorithms.