One trouble I could see with your approach is that you treat the information "Doc at pos i" beats "Doc at pos j" independently from i and j. Intuitively, it is

One trouble I could see with your approach is that you treat the information "Doc at pos i" beats "Doc at pos j" independently from i and j. Intuitively, it is not as critical when a bad doc is at rank 9 instead of rank 10; compared to bad doc landing at rank 1 instead of rank 10. LambdaMART's approach seems better in that respect. https://medium.com/@nikhilbd/pointwise-vs-pairwise-vs-listwise-learning-to-rank-80a8fe8fadfd https://medium.com/@nikhilbd/pointwise-vs-pairwise-vs-listwi...