Unimodal Likelihood Models for Ordinal Data

Published: 09 Oct 2022, Last Modified: 28 Feb 2023Accepted by TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Abstract: Ordinal regression (OR) is the classification of ordinal data, in which the underlying target variable is categorical and considered to have a natural ordinal relation for the explanatory variables. In this study, we suppose the unimodality of the conditional probability distribution of the target variable given a value of the explanatory variables as a natural ordinal relation of the ordinal data. Under this supposition, unimodal likelihood models are considered to be promising for achieving good generalization performance in OR tasks. Demonstrating that previous unimodal likelihood models have a weak representation ability, we thus develop more representable unimodal likelihood models, including the most representable one. OR experiments in this study showed that the developed more representable unimodal likelihood models could yield better generalization performance for real-world ordinal data compared with previous unimodal likelihood models and popular statistical OR models having no unimodality guarantee.
Submission Length: Long submission (more than 12 pages of main content)
Changes Since Last Submission: We submit the camera-ready version.
Code: https://github.com/yamasakiryoya/ULM
Assigned Action Editor: ~Shinichi_Nakajima2
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Submission Number: 278
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