Random Forest for Label Ranking
This addresses label ranking problems, which are incremental improvements to existing methods.
The paper tackles label ranking by developing a random forest method that uses random decision trees to find nearest neighbors and a novel two-step rank aggregation strategy. The method achieves highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on datasets with complete and partial ranking information.
Label ranking aims to learn a mapping from instances to rankings over a finite number of predefined labels. Random forest is a powerful and one of the most successful general-purpose machine learning algorithms of modern times. In this paper, we present a powerful random forest label ranking method which uses random decision trees to retrieve nearest neighbors. We have developed a novel two-step rank aggregation strategy to effectively aggregate neighboring rankings discovered by the random forest into a final predicted ranking. Compared with existing methods, the new random forest method has many advantages including its intrinsically scalable tree data structure, highly parallel-able computational architecture and much superior performance. We present extensive experimental results to demonstrate that our new method achieves the highly competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods for datasets with complete ranking and datasets with only partial ranking information.