Predicting accurate probabilities with a ranking loss

Understand

In many real-world applications of machine learning classifiers, it is essential to predict the probability of an example belonging to a particular class.

• This paper proposes a simple technique for predicting probabilities based on optimizing a ranking loss, followed by isotonic regression.
• This semi-parametric technique offers both good ranking and regression performance, and models a richer set of probability distributions than statistical workhorses such as logistic regression.
• We provide experimental results that show the effectiveness of this technique on real-world applications of probability prediction.