Analogy-Based Preference Learning with Kernels
This work addresses preference learning for ranking tasks, offering a novel integration of analogical reasoning with kernel methods, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing SVM frameworks.
The paper tackled the problem of object ranking in preference learning by connecting analogical reasoning with kernel-based machine learning, introducing an analogy kernel and applying it with support vector machines, resulting in competitive predictive accuracy on datasets from domains like sports and education.
Building on a specific formalization of analogical relationships of the form "A relates to B as C relates to D", we establish a connection between two important subfields of artificial intelligence, namely analogical reasoning and kernel-based machine learning. More specifically, we show that so-called analogical proportions are closely connected to kernel functions on pairs of objects. Based on this result, we introduce the analogy kernel, which can be seen as a measure of how strongly four objects are in analogical relationship. As an application, we consider the problem of object ranking in the realm of preference learning, for which we develop a new method based on support vector machines trained with the analogy kernel. Our first experimental results for data sets from different domains (sports, education, tourism, etc.) are promising and suggest that our approach is competitive to state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of predictive accuracy.