Large-Margin Thresholded Ensembles for Ordinal Regression: Theory and Practice Authors: Hsuan-Tien Lin and Ling Li Source: Algorithmic Learning Theory, 17th International Conference, ALT 2006, Barcelona, October 2006, Proceedings, (José L. Balcázar, Phil Long and Frank Stephan, Eds.), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 4264, pp. 319 - 333, Springer 2006. Abstract. We propose a thresholded ensemble model for ordinal regression problems. The model consists of a weighted ensemble of confidence functions and an ordered vector of thresholds. We derive novel large-margin bounds of common error functions, such as the classification error and the absolute error. In addition to some existing algorithms, we also study two novel boosting approaches for constructing thresholded ensembles. Both our approaches not only are simpler than existing algorithms, but also have a stronger connection to the large-margin bounds. In addition, they have comparable performance to SVM-based algorithms, but enjoy the benefit of faster training. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the usefulness of our boosting approaches. ©Copyright 2006, Springer