Possibilistic Estimation of Distributions to Leverage Sparse Data in Machine Learning

Prompted by an application in the area of human geography using machine learning to study housing market valuation based on the urban form, we propose a method based on possibility theory to deal with sparse data, which can be combined with any machine learning method to approach weakly supervised learning problems. More specifically, the solution we propose constructs a possibilistic loss function to account for an uncertain supervisory signal. Although the proposal is illustrated on a specific application, its basic principles are general. The proposed method is then empirically validated on real-world data.