  The problem of maximizing precision at the top of a ranked list, often dubbed
Precision@k (prec@k), finds relevance in myriad learning applications such as
ranking, multi-label classification, and learning with severe label imbalance.
However, despite its popularity, there exist significant gaps in our
understanding of this problem and its associated performance measure.
  The most notable of these is the lack of a convex upper bounding surrogate
for prec@k. We also lack scalable perceptron and stochastic gradient descent
algorithms for optimizing this performance measure. In this paper we make key
contributions in these directions. At the heart of our results is a family of
truly upper bounding surrogates for prec@k. These surrogates are motivated in a
principled manner and enjoy attractive properties such as consistency to prec@k
under various natural margin/noise conditions.
  These surrogates are then used to design a class of novel perceptron
algorithms for optimizing prec@k with provable mistake bounds. We also devise
scalable stochastic gradient descent style methods for this problem with
provable convergence bounds. Our proofs rely on novel uniform convergence
bounds which require an in-depth analysis of the structural properties of
prec@k and its surrogates. We conclude with experimental results comparing our
algorithms with state-of-the-art cutting plane and stochastic gradient
algorithms for maximizing prec@k.
