  It is the main goal of this article to address the bipartite ranking issue
from the perspective of functional data analysis (FDA). Given a training set of
independent realizations of a (possibly sampled) second-order random function
with a (locally) smooth autocorrelation structure and to which a binary label
is randomly assigned, the objective is to learn a scoring function s with
optimal ROC curve. Based on linear/nonlinear wavelet-based approximations, it
is shown how to select compact finite dimensional representations of the input
curves adaptively, in order to build accurate ranking rules, using recent
advances in the ranking problem for multivariate data with binary feedback.
Beyond theoretical considerations, the performance of the learning methods for
functional bipartite ranking proposed in this paper are illustrated by
numerical experiments.
