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Conditional preference networks (CP-nets) are an intuitive and expressive representation for qualitative preferences. Such models must somehow be acquired. Psychologists argue that direct elicitation is suspect. On the other hand, learning general CP-nets from pairwise comparisons is NP-hard, and — for some notions of learning — this extends even to the simplest forms of CP-nets. We introduce a novel, concise encoding of binary-valued, tree-structured CP-nets that supports the first local-search-based CP-net learning algorithms. While exact learning of binary-valued, tree-structured CP-nets — for a strict, entailment-based notion of learning — is already in P, our algorithm is the first space-efficient learning algorithm that gracefully handles noisy (i.e., realistic) comparison sets.

preferences; learning; CP-nets