A general magnitude-preserving boosting algorithm for search ranking

Traditional boosting algorithms for the ranking problems usually employ the pairwise approach and convert the document rating preference into a binary-value label, like RankBoost. However, such a pairwise approach ignores the information about the magnitude of preference in the learning process. In this paper, we present the directed distance function (DDF) as a substitute for binary labels in pairwise approach to preserve the magnitude of preference and propose a new boosting algorithm called MPBoost, which applies GentleBoost optimization and directly incorporates DDF into the exponential loss function. We give the boundedness property of MPBoost through theoretic analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that MPBoost not only leads to better NDCG accuracy as compared to state-of-the-art ranking solutions in both public and commercial datasets, but also has good properties of avoiding the overfitting problem in the task of learning ranking functions.

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