---
title: "Learning Optimal Subsets with Implicit User Preferences"
authors:
  - "Yunsong Guo"
  - "Carla P. Gomes"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/178"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/0178.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2009
pages: "1052-1056"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Learning Optimal Subsets with Implicit User Preferences

Yunsong Guo, Carla P. Gomes

*Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1052-1056.

## Abstract

We study the problem of learning an optimal subset from a larger ground set of items, where the optimality criterion is defined by an unknown preference function. We model the problem as a discriminative structural learning problem and solve it using a Structural Support Vector Machine (SSVM) that optimizes a set accuracy performance measure representing set similarities. Our approach departs from previous approaches since we do not explicitly learn a pre-defined preference function. Experimental results on both a synthetic problem domain and a real-world face image subset selection problem show that our method significantly outperforms previous learning approaches for such problems.Yunsong Guo, Carla Gomes