L2P: An Algorithm for Estimating Heavy-tailed Outcomes

08/13/2019
by   Xindi Wang, et al.
0

Many real-world prediction tasks have outcome (a.k.a. target or response) variables that have characteristic heavy-tail distributions. Examples include copies of books sold, auction prices of art pieces, etc. By learning heavy-tailed distributions, "big and rare" instances (e.g., the best-sellers) will have accurate predictions. Most existing approaches are not dedicated to learning heavy-tailed distribution; thus, they heavily under-predict such instances. To tackle this problem, we introduce Learning to Place (L2P), which exploits the pairwise relationships between instances to learn from a proportionally higher number of rare instances. L2P consists of two stages. In Stage 1, L2P learns a pairwise preference classifier: is instance A > instance B?. In Stage 2, L2P learns to place a new instance into an ordinal ranking of known instances. Based on its placement, the new instance is then assigned a value for its outcome variable. Experiments on real data show that L2P outperforms competing approaches in terms of accuracy and capability to reproduce heavy-tailed outcome distribution. In addition, L2P can provide an interpretable model with explainable outcomes by placing each predicted instance in context with its comparable neighbors.

READ FULL TEXT

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset