It is critical for retail enterprises to select good sites or locations to open their stores, especially in current competitive retail market. However, evaluating the goodness of sites in real business applications is a complex problem. That is, how to judge whether the market around a store site is good? We don't know the exact mechanism of how a site can be good and it is hard to have correct site goodness values as supervised labels. The Retail Outlet Site Evaluation (ROSE) tool is designed to learn the site evaluation model by integrating city geographic & demographic data and two kinds of expert knowledge: sample preference and feature preference. The feature preference information can help greatly reduce the required number of sample preferences. It enables our application practicable because it is almost impossible to give such amount of sample preference pairs manually by experts when ranking hundreds of data points. In the experiment and case study part, we show that the ROSE tool can achieve good results and useful for users to do site evaluation work in real cases.

This paper proposes a semi-supervised distance metric learning algorithm for the ranking problem. Instead of giving the computer what are the important factors that affect the final rank value, we only give several most certainly ranked points which implicitly contain the knowledge of the ranking factors. Then the computer can automatically use the most certain points and plenty of unlabeded data to learn an informative metric for ranking. This metric not only can help to regress an order in the observed data, but also can be used to retrieve the data by querying new test points. Moreover, the lower-rank distance metric can be used to visualize high-dimensional data. We also present an application to the housing potential estimation problem. It is shown that the algorithm is efficient to help consultants to refine their consulting work.