Max-Ordinal Learning

In predictive modeling tasks, knowledge about the training examples is neither fully complete nor totally incomplete. Unlike semisupervised learning, where one either has perfect knowledge about the label of the point or is completely ignorant about it, here we address a setting where, for each example, we only possess partial information about the label. Each example is described using two (or more) different feature sets or views, where neither are necessarily observed for a given example. If a single view is observed, then the class is only due to that feature set; if more views are present, the observed class label is the maximum of the values corresponding to the individual views. After formalizing this new learning concept, we propose two new learning methodologies that are adapted to this learning paradigm. We also compare their instantiation in experiments with different base models and with conventional methods. The experimental results made both on real and synthetic data sets verify the usefulness of the proposed approaches.