Probabilistic n-Choose-k Models for Classification and Ranking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In categorical data there is often structure in the number of variables that take on each label. For example, the total number of objects in an image and the number of highly relevant documents per query in web search both tend to follow a structured distribution. In this paper, we study a probabilistic model that explicitly includes a prior distribution over such counts, along with a count-conditional likelihood that defines probabilities over all subsets of a given size. When labels are binary and the prior over counts is a Poisson-Binomial distribution, a standard logistic regression model is recovered, but for other count distributions, such priors induce global dependencies and combinatorics that appear to complicate learning and inference. However, we demonstrate that simple, efficient learning procedures can be derived for more general forms of this model. We illustrate the utility of the formulation by exploring applications to multi-object classification, learning to rank, and top-K classification. 1
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".