Solved – ordinal classification using C5.0

categorical dataclassificationmachine learningordinal-data

My question is about machine learning to predict ordinal variables.

Most ML models for classification that I have seen do not make any assumption about the order of different categories. I can see that ordinal categorical variables have been used in ML as a predictor variable, but not seen it as a predicted variable.

I am using the caret package in R and in specific looking to predict an ordinal categorical variable using C5.0

Is this possible? and also if the "values" of the order of the categories was 1,2,3 for three categories, would the predicted value ever be something like 1.7 which would suggest that the predictors expect the value to be between 1 and 2 but closer to 2?

If it is possible could a dummy example be shown of how this would be set up?

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

I don't know the caret package but one method that does use the ordinality of the variable is ordinal logistic regression. In addition, Alan Agresti wrote an entire book on dealing with ordinal data:

Related Question