Abstract
Machine learning methods for classification problems commonly assume that the class values are unordered. However, in many practical applications the class values do exhibit a natural order—for example, when learning how to grade. The standard approach to ordinal classification converts the class value into a numeric quantity and applies a regression learner to the transformed data, translating the output back into a discrete class value in a post-processing step. A disadvantage of this method is that it can only be applied in conjunction with a regression scheme.
In this paper we present a simple method that enables standard classification algorithms to make use of ordering information in class attributes. By applying it in conjunction with a decision tree learner we show that it outperforms the naive approach, which treats the class values as an unordered set. Compared to special-purpose algorithms for ordinal classification our method has the advantage that it can be applied without any modification to the underlying learning scheme.
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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Frank, E., Hall, M. (2001). A Simple Approach to Ordinal Classification. In: De Raedt, L., Flach, P. (eds) Machine Learning: ECML 2001. ECML 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2167. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44795-4_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44795-4_13
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