  Ordinal regression is commonly formulated as a multi-class problem with
ordinal constraints. The challenge of designing accurate classifiers for
ordinal regression generally increases with the number of classes involved, due
to the large number of labeled patterns that are needed. The availability of
ordinal class labels, however, is often costly to calibrate or difficult to
obtain. Unlabeled patterns, on the other hand, often exist in much greater
abundance and are freely available. To take benefits from the abundance of
unlabeled patterns, we present a novel transductive learning paradigm for
ordinal regression in this paper, namely Transductive Ordinal Regression (TOR).
The key challenge of the present study lies in the precise estimation of both
the ordinal class label of the unlabeled data and the decision functions of the
ordinal classes, simultaneously. The core elements of the proposed TOR include
an objective function that caters to several commonly used loss functions
casted in transductive settings, for general ordinal regression. A label
swapping scheme that facilitates a strictly monotonic decrease in the objective
function value is also introduced. Extensive numerical studies on commonly used
benchmark datasets including the real world sentiment prediction problem are
then presented to showcase the characteristics and efficacies of the proposed
transductive ordinal regression. Further, comparisons to recent
state-of-the-art ordinal regression methods demonstrate the introduced
transductive learning paradigm for ordinal regression led to the robust and
improved performance.
