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Ordinal regression classifies an object to a class out of a given set of possible classes, where labels possess a natural order. It is relevant to a wide array of domains including risk assessment, sentiment analysis, image ranking, and recommender systems. Like common classification, the primary goal of ordinal regression is accuracy. Yet, in this context, the severity of prediction errors varies, e.g., in risk assessment, Critical Risk is more urgent than High risk and significantly more urgent than No risk. This leads to a modified objective of ensuring that the model's output is as close as possible to the correct class, considering the order of labels. Therefore, ordinal regression models should use ordinality-aware loss for training. In this work, we focus on two properties of ordinality-aware losses, namely monotonicity and balance sensitivity. We show that existing ordinal loss functions lack these properties and introduce SLACE (Soft Labels Accumulating Cross Entropy), a novel loss function that provably satisfies said properties. We demonstrate empirically that SLACE outperforms the state-of-the-art ordinal loss functions on most tabular ordinal regression benchmarks.
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This content will become publicly available on June 27, 2026
On logistic regression and maximum entropy approaches
Logistic Regression is a widely used generalized linear model applied in classification settings to assign probabilities to class labels. It is also well known that logistic regression is a maximum entropy procedure subject to what are sometimes called the balance conditions. The dominant view in existing explanations are all discriminative, i.e., modeling labels given the data. This paper adds to the maximum entropy interpretation, establishing a generative, maximum entropy explanation for the commonly used logistic regression training and optimization procedures. We show that logistic regression models the conditional distribution on the instance space given class labels with a maximum entropy model subject to a first moment constraint on the training data, and that the commonly used fitting procedure would be a Monte-Carlo fit for the generative view.
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- PAR ID:
- 10586900
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE Symposium on Information Theory
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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