Learning rates for regularized least squares ranking algorithm

The ranking problem aims at learning real-valued functions to order instances, which has attracted great interest in statistical learning theory. In this paper, we consider the regularized least squares ranking algorithm within the framework of reproducing kernel Hilbert space. In particular, we focus on analysis of the generalization error for this ranking algorithm, and improve the existing learning rates by virtue of an error decomposition technique from regression and Hoeffding’s decomposition for U-statistics.