New method uniquely identifies causal structure from ordinal data.
problem Challenges in causal discovery for categorical data, especially direction of relationships.
method Exploits ordinal information to uniquely identify causal structure.
result Favorable and robust performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Unified CI test for categorical and ordinal data maintains power in high dimensions.
problem Rapid degradation of statistical power in existing CI tests for high-dimensional conditioning variables.
method Unified CI test for categorical and ordinal data, maintaining reasonable calibration and power in high dimensions.
result Our test outperforms existing baselines in model testing and structure learning for dense directed graphical models.
The paper proposes a test to determine the number of latent classes in ordinal categorical data.
problem Determining the correct number of latent classes in latent class models with ordinal categorical data.
method The test statistic centers the largest singular value of a normalized residual matrix by a simple sample-size adjustment.
result The test statistic converges to zero under the null hypothesis and exceeds a fixed positive constant under an under-fitted alternative.
A popular approach for large scale data annotation tasks is crowdsourcing, wherein each data point is labeled by multiple noisy annotators. We consider the problem of inferring ground truth from noisy ordinal labels obtained from multiple annotators of varying and unknown expertise levels. Annotation models for ordinal…
Proposes models to better represent ordinal data with non-unimodal distributions.
problem Real-world ordinal data often have non-unimodal conditional probability distributions.
method Develops approximately unimodal likelihood models to better represent non-unimodal CPDs.
result Proposed models can effectively represent both unimodal and nearly unimodal CPDs.
Proposes a VAE variant for ordinal content factors.
problem Isolating ordinal-valued content factors in deep latent variable models.
method Introduces a partially ordered set (poset) structure and a conditional Gaussian spacing prior model.
result Significant improvements in content-style separation over previous non-ordinal approaches.
OMERF extends random forest for hierarchical data and ordinal responses.
problem Analyzing hierarchical data and ordinal responses using tree-based methods.
method Ordinal Mixed-Effects Random Forest (OMERF) that preserves flexibility and hierarchical structure.
result OMERF identifies discriminating student characteristics and estimates school effects.
New method for ordinal data improves recommendation systems.
problem Improving recommendation systems with ordinal data.
method Ordinal Non-negative Matrix Factorization (OrdNMF) for ordinal data.
result OrdNMF outperforms existing methods in recommendation experiments.
Develops a new method for decision trees using categorical variable structure.
problem Lack of structure in treating categorical variables as predictors.
method Introduces a mathematical framework to represent categorical structure and generalizes decision trees to utilize this structure.
result Improves prediction accuracy on weather data using the new method.
Paper introduces new methods for modeling categorical data.
problem Training generative models on categorical data like text and segmentation.
method Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion models.
result Models outperform existing methods in log-likelihood.
This paper applies deep learning to ordinal regression, modeling it as a binary search.
problem Ordinal regression with deep learning models.
method Formulated ordinal regression as a binary search problem, using recurrent neural networks.
result Deep learning model shows comparable or better predictive power compared to traditional methods.
TabSODA improves imputation of surveys with skips and ordinal data.
problem Handling structural skips and ordinal responses in survey data.
method TabSODA uses an Elucidated Diffusion Model with skip pattern detection and ordinal awareness.
result TabSODA reduces ordinal missing-at-random (MACE) by up to 23.7% and improves categorical accuracy by up to 9%.
VAIOM models financial returns using continuous input and categorical output.
problem Modeling continuous, noisy, and heterogeneous financial data.
method VAIOM is a decoder-only Transformer that separates input representation from output likelihood.
result VAIOM models outperform fixed single-bar LightGBM baseline in both Test halves.
Bayesian optimization for high-dimensional combinatorial spaces using embeddings.
problem Optimizing expensive functions over large, complex input spaces.
method Dictionary-based ordinal embeddings for high-dimensional combinatorial structures, using Gaussian process models.
result The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art BO methods on diverse real-world benchmarks.
A new method clusters categorical data by learning their optimal order and distance.
problem Clustering categorical data lacks a well-defined metric space.
method Order distance metric learning for categorical data.
result Superior clustering accuracy on categorical and mixed datasets.
Bayesian model for discrete data with conditional transformations.
problem Handling discrete ordinal and count data with excess zeros.
method Bayesian framework with conditional transformation functions and modular MCMC algorithm.
result Flexible modeling of linear and nonlinear covariate effects for ordinal and count data.
cGAP visualizes high-dimensional categorical data with interpretable geometric structure.
problem Lack of visualization tools for high-dimensional categorical data.
method cGAP uses Homogeneity Analysis (HOMALS) to embed data in a 3D space and maps it to colors.
result cGAP reveals coherent clusters, outliers, and local-to-global structure in categorical data.
cGAP visualizes high-dimensional categorical data with interpretable geometric structure.
problem Lack of visualization tools for high-dimensional categorical data.
method cGAP uses Homogeneity Analysis (HOMALS) to embed data in a 3D space and maps it to colors for visualization.
result cGAP reveals coherent clusters, outliers, and local-to-global structure in categorical data.
IRTCI uses IRT for categorical imputation, outperforming other methods in various datasets.
problem Missing data in datasets limits model testing and statistical inference.
method Item Response Theory for Categorical Imputation (IRTCI) based on IRT.
result IRTCI outperformed kNN, MICE, and Datawig in various datasets.
A new method clusters mixed-type data efficiently.
problem Clustering mixed-type data with continuous and categorical variables.
method Extends Information Bottleneck principle to heterogeneous data using generalised product kernels.
result DIBmix outperforms four established methods in various scenarios.
The study analyzes decision trees on real and categorical features, deriving bounds on their VC dimension and proposing improved pruning algorithms.
problem Understanding the generalization properties of decision trees on different types of features.
method Introducing partitioning functions, relating them to growth functions and VC dimension, and deriving bounds for decision stumps and trees of various structures.
result Exact VC dimension of decision stumps and improved pruning algorithms for binary trees.
This study compares the effectiveness and robustness of multi-class categorization of Amazon product data using transfer learning on pre-trained contextualized language models. Specifically, we fine-tuned BERT and XLNet, two bidirectional models that have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many natural language t…
New methods for ordinal classification of interval-valued data and functional data.
problem Ordinal classification of interval-valued data and functional data.
method Six ordinal classifiers are proposed, including parametric, binary decomposition, logistic regression, distance-based, k-nearest-neighbor, kernel PCA, and random forest methods.
result Considering ordering and interval-valued information improves the accuracy of ordinal classification.
Bayesian methods improve inference for cumulative probit models on large datasets.
problem Challenges in Bayesian inference for large cumulative probit models.
method Proposed scalable algorithms using Variational Bayes and Expectation Propagation.
result Superior computational performance and accuracy compared to MCMC.
Variational autoencoders (VAEs), as well as other generative models, have been shown to be efficient and accurate for capturing the latent structure of vast amounts of complex high-dimensional data. However, existing VAEs can still not directly handle data that are heterogenous (mixed continuous and discrete) or incomp…
Binary feedback outperforms ordinal comparisons in ranking recovery.
problem Challenges the conventional wisdom that ordinal comparisons offer richer information.
method Proposes a parametric framework for modeling ordinal paired comparisons, binarizing ordinal data, and proving faster convergence rates for binary comparisons.
result Binarizing ordinal data significantly improves ranking recovery accuracy and exhibits a substantial performance gap.
Deep neural networks for ordinal outcomes combining image and tabular data.
problem Lack of interpretable models for ordinal outcomes in mixed data types.
method Ordinal Neural Network Transformation Models (ONTRAMs) integrating DL and classical ordinal regression.
result ONTRAMs achieve performance equivalent to standard multi-class DL models but are faster and more interpretable.
Proposes a deep learning method for robust ordinal regression under label noise.
problem Label noise in real-world data constrains ordinal regression algorithms.
method Develops a deep learning approach that is robust to label noise and rank consistent.
result Demonstrates robustness to label noise and rank consistency on real data.
Principal components analysis (PCA) is a well-known technique for approximating a tabular data set by a low rank matrix. Here, we extend the idea of PCA to handle arbitrary data sets consisting of numerical, Boolean, categorical, ordinal, and other data types. This framework encompasses many well known techniques in da…
A new framework estimates causal effects for ordinal variables.
problem Existing causal inference methods fail for ordinal data.
method Presumes a latent Gaussian DAG model with constrained covariance matrix.
result Closed-form function for ordinal causal effects in latent space.
Many real-world datasets are labeled with natural orders, i.e., ordinal labels. Ordinal regression is a method to predict ordinal labels that finds a wide range of applications in data-rich domains, such as natural, health and social sciences. Most existing ordinal regression approaches work well for independent and id…
Ordinal data are often seen in real applications. Regular multicategory classification methods are not designed for this data type and a more proper treatment is needed. We consider a framework of ordinal classification which pools the results from binary classifiers together. An inherent difficulty of this framework i…
Ordinal regression is aimed at predicting an ordinal class label. In this paper, we consider its semi-supervised formulation, in which we have unlabeled data along with ordinal-labeled data to train an ordinal regressor. There are several metrics to evaluate the performance of ordinal regression, such as the mean absol…
Ordinal Data are those where a natural order exist between the labels. The classification and pre-processing of this type of data is attracting more and more interest in the area of machine learning, due to its presence in many common problems. Traditionally, ordinal classification problems have been approached as nomi…
In recent years it has become popular to study machine learning problems in a setting of ordinal distance information rather than numerical distance measurements. By ordinal distance information we refer to binary answers to distance comparisons such as d(A,B)<d(C,D). For many problems in machine learning and statist…
We introduce Thurstonian Boltzmann Machines (TBM), a unified architecture that can naturally incorporate a wide range of data inputs at the same time. Our motivation rests in the Thurstonian view that many discrete data types can be considered as being generated from a subset of underlying latent continuous variables, …
Ordinal data is omnipresent in almost all multiuser-generated feedback - questionnaires, preferences etc. This paper investigates modelling of ordinal data with Gaussian restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs). In particular, we present the model architecture, learning and inference procedures for both vector-variate and …
In this paper we combine two important extensions of ordinary least squares regression: regularization and optimal scaling. Optimal scaling (sometimes also called optimal scoring) has originally been developed for categorical data, and the process finds quantifications for the categories that are optimal for the regres…
PRESTO improves rare event prediction by shrinking towards proportional odds model.
problem Difficult to predict rare events due to class imbalance.
method PRESTO relaxes proportional odds model by estimating separate weights for transitions between categories, imposing L1 penalty to shrink towards proportional odds.
result PRESTO consistently estimates decision boundary weights under sparsity assumption, improving rare probability estimation.
When eliciting judgements from humans for an unknown quantity, one often has the choice of making direct-scoring (cardinal) or comparative (ordinal) measurements. In this paper we study the relative merits of either choice, providing empirical and theoretical guidelines for the selection of a measurement scheme. We pro…
New framework learns complex AI attitudes from heterogeneous data.
problem Heterogeneous ordinal structure in AI attitudes, poorly captured by existing methods.
method Monotone Gaussian score embedding, BNP complexity discovery, confirmatory fixed-K estimation.
result Reduced holdout MSE by 25.8% over single-graph baseline.
We propose a novel method for automatic pain intensity estimation from facial images based on the framework of kernel Conditional Ordinal Random Fields (KCORF). We extend this framework to account for heteroscedasticity on the output labels(i.e., pain intensity scores) and introduce a novel dynamic features, dynamic ra…
VAEM extends VAEs to handle mixed-type data heterogeneity.
problem Heterogeneous data with different types and marginal distributions.
method Two-stage training approach to handle mixed-type data.
result VAEM improves deep generative model performance on diverse tasks.
SurvCORN predicts survival curves using conditional ordinal ranking networks.
problem Challenges in survival analysis with censored data.
method SurvCORN: Conditional Ordinal Ranking Neural Network.
result SurvCORN improves accuracy in predicting time-to-event outcomes.
K-Models clusters functional data with ordinal constraints for better interpretability.
problem Challenges in extracting meaningful insights from functional data due to lack of interpretability.
method Integrates ordinal constraints into clustering to improve interpretability and structure identification.
result Enhances interpretability of clustering results while maintaining performance.
We introduce two types of ordinal pattern dependence between time series. Positive (resp. negative) ordinal pattern dependence can be seen as a non-paramatric and in particular non-linear counterpart to positive (resp. negative) correlation. We show in an explorative study that both types of this dependence show up in …
A scalable algorithm improves AUC optimization for semi-supervised ordinal regression.
problem Optimizing AUC for semi-supervised ordinal regression with limited labeled data.
method Proposes QS3ORAO using quadruply stochastic gradients for scalable kernelized learning. result Converges to optimal solution at O(1/t) rate, demonstrating efficiency and effectiveness. The increasing occurrence of ordinal data, mainly sociodemographic, led to a renewed research interest in ordinal regression, i.e. the prediction of ordered classes. Besides model accuracy, the interpretation of these models itself is of high relevance, and existing approaches therefore enforce e.g. model sparsity. For…