Boosting for Comparison-Based Learning

Boosting for Comparison-Based Learning

Michael Perrot, Ulrike von Luxburg

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 1844-1850. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/255

We consider the problem of classification in a comparison-based setting: given a set of objects, we only have access to triplet comparisons of the form ``object A is closer to object B than to object C.'' In this paper we introduce TripletBoost, a new method that can learn a classifier just from such triplet comparisons. The main idea is to aggregate the triplets information into weak classifiers, which can subsequently be boosted to a strong classifier. Our method has two main advantages: (i) it is applicable to data from any metric space, and (ii) it can deal with large scale problems using only passively obtained and noisy triplets. We derive theoretical generalization guarantees and a lower bound on the number of necessary triplets, and we empirically show that our method is both competitive with state of the art approaches and resistant to noise.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preference Modelling and Preference-Based Reasoning
Humans and AI: Human Computation and Crowdsourcing