Ranking via Robust Binary Classification

We propose RoBiRank, a ranking algorithm that is motivated by observing a close connection between evaluation metrics for learning to rank and loss functions for robust classification. It shows competitive performance on standard benchmark datasets against a number of other representative algorithms in the literature. We also discuss extensions of RoBiRank to large scale problems where explicit feature vectors and scores are not given. We show that RoBiRank can be efficiently parallelized across a large number of machines; for a task that requires 386,133 x 49,824, 519 pairwise interactions between items to be ranked, RoBiRank finds solutions that are of dramatically higher quality than that can be found by a state-of-the-art competitor algorithm, given the same amount of wall-clock time for computation.

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