Ranking Objectives

Stub. Created as a placeholder — expand with vault-sourced content.

Definition

The objective (loss) a Learning to Rank model optimizes. Three families: pointwise (regress/classify each doc), pairwise (preference between two docs), listwise (optimize a list metric like NDCG directly). These map onto the evaluation paradigms in Pointwise Relevance Evaluation / Pairwise Relevance Evaluation / Listwise Relevance Evaluation.

Concrete objectives by library (to verify/expand)

  • LightGBM: lambdarank
  • XGBoost: rank:ndcg, rank:map, rank:pairwise
  • CatBoost: YetiRank, PairLogit, QueryRMSE

TODO

  • Confirm objective lists against current library docs before treating as fact.
  • Cross-link each to LambdaMART.