Semi-Supervised Ordinal Regression Based on Empirical Risk Minimization
We consider the semi-supervised ordinal regression problem, where unlabeled data are given in addition to ordinal labeled data. There are many evaluation metrics in ordinal regression such as the mean absolute error, mean squared error, and mean classification error. Existing work does not take the evaluation metric into account, has a restriction on the model choice, and has no theoretical guarantee. To mitigate these problems, we propose a method based on the empirical risk minimization (ERM) framework that is applicable to optimizing all of the metrics mentioned above. Also, our method has flexible choices of models, surrogate losses, and optimization algorithms. Moreover, our method does not require a restrictive assumption on unlabeled data such as the cluster assumption and manifold assumption. We provide an estimation error bound to show that our learning method is consistent. Finally, we conduct experiments to show the usefulness of our framework.
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