Multi-interval discretization of continuous attributes for label ranking

Label Ranking (LR) problems, such as predicting rankings of financial analysts, are becoming increasingly important in data mining. While there has been a significant amount of work on the development of learning algorithms for LR in recent years, pre-processing methods for LR are still very scarce. However, some methods, like Naive Bayes for LR and APRIORI-LR, cannot deal with real-valued data directly. As a make-shift solution, one could consider conventional discretization methods used in classification, by simply treating each unique ranking as a separate class. In this paper, we show that such an approach has several disadvantages. As an alternative, we propose an adaptation of an existing method, MDLP, specifically for LR problems. We illustrate the advantages of the new method using synthetic data. Additionally, we present results obtained on several benchmark datasets. The results clearly indicate that the discretization is performing as expected and in some cases improves the results of the learning algorithms.