Learning to rank: using Bayesian networks

Abstract

Ranking is one of the key components of an Information Retrieval system. Recently supervised learning is involved for learning the ranking function and is called 'Learning to Rank' collectively. In this study we present one approach to solve this problem. We intend to test this problem in di erent stochastic environment and hence we choose to use Bayesian Networks for machine learning. This work also involves experimentation results on standard learning to rank dataset `Letor4.0'[6]. We call our approach as BayesNetRank. We compare the performance of BayesNetRank with another Support Vector Machine(SVM) based approach called RankSVM [5]. Performance analysis is also involved in the study to identify for which kind of queries, proposed system gives results on either extremes. Evaluation results are shown using two rank based evaluation metrics, Mean Average Precision (MAP) and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG).