Your relevance feedback is essential: enhancing the learning to rank using the virtual feature based logistic regression

PLoS One. 2012;7(12):e50112. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0050112. Epub 2012 Dec 10.

Abstract

Information retrieval applications have to publish their output in the form of ranked lists. Such a requirement motivates researchers to develop methods that can automatically learn effective ranking models. Many existing methods usually perform analysis on multidimensional features of query-document pairs directly and don't take users' interactive feedback information into account. They thus incur the high computation overhead and low retrieval performance due to an indefinite query expression. In this paper, we propose a Virtual Feature based Logistic Regression (VFLR) ranking method that conducts the logistic regression on a set of essential but independent variables, called virtual features (VF). They are extracted via the principal component analysis (PCA) method with the user's relevance feedback. We then predict the ranking score of each queried document to produce a ranked list. We systematically evaluate our method using the LETOR 4.0 benchmark datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposal outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the Mean Average Precision (MAP), the Precision at position k (P@k), and the Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain at position k (NDCG@k).

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Feedback
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods*
  • Logistic Models*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated

Grants and funding

This work is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61070216, and the National Basic Research Program of China under Grant No. 613154. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.