Multi-label classification

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Not to be confused with multiclass classification.
"RAKEL" redirects here. For the given name "Rakel", see Rachel (given name).


There are two main methods for tackling the multi-label classification problem:[1] problem transformation methods and algorithm adaptation methods. Problem transformation methods transform the multi-label problem into a set of binary classification problems, which can then be handled using single-class classifiers. Algorithm adaptation methods adapt the algorithms to directly perform multi-label classification. In other words, rather than trying to convert the problem to a simpler problem, they try to address the problem in its full form.

Problem transformation methods[edit]

Several problem transformation methods exist for multi-label classification; the baseline approach, called the binary relevance method,[2][1] amounts to independently training one binary classifier for each label. Given an unseen sample, the combined model then predicts all labels for this sample for which the respective classifiers predict a positive result. This method of dividing the task into multiple binary tasks has something in common with the one-vs.-all (OvA, or one-vs.-rest, OvR) method for multiclass classification. Note though that it is not the same method: in binary relevance we train one classifier for each label, not one classifier for each possible value for the label.

Various other transformations exist. Of these, the label powerset (LP) transformation creates one binary classifier for every label combination attested in the training set.[1] The random k-labelsets (RAKEL) algorithm uses multiple LP classifiers, each trained on a random subset of the actual labels; prediction using this ensemble method proceeds by a voting scheme.[3]

Classifier chains are an alternative ensembling method.[2]

Adapted algorithms for multi-label classification[edit]

Some classification algorithms/models have been adaptated to the multi-label task, without requiring problem transformations. Examples of these include:

Statistics and evaluation metrics[edit]

The extent to which a dataset is multi-label can be captured in two statistics:[1]

  • Label cardinality is the average number of labels per example in the set: \frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N |Y_i|;
  • label density is the number of labels per sample divided by the total number of labels, averaged over the samples: \frac{1}{N} \sum _{i=1}^N \frac{|Y_i|}{|L|} where L = \bigcup_{i=1}^N Y_i.

Evaluation metrics for multi-label classification performance are inherently different from those used in multi-class (or binary) classification, due to the inherent differences of the classification problem. If T denotes the true set of labels for a given sample, and P the predicted set of labels, then the following metrics can be defined on that sample:

  • Hamming loss: the fraction of the wrong labels to the total number of labels. This is a loss function, so the optimal value is zero. The closely related Hamming score, also called accuracy in the multi-label setting, is defined as the number of correct labels divided by the union of predicted and true labels, \frac{|T \cap P|}{|T \cup P|}.[7]
  • Precision, recall and F_1 score: precision is \frac{|T \cap P|}{|P|}, recall is \frac{|T \cap P|}{|T|}, and F_1 is their harmonic mean.[7]

Cross-validation in multi-label settings is complicated by the fact that the ordinary (binary/multiclass) way of stratified sampling will not work; alternative ways of approximate stratified sampling have been suggested.[8]

Implementations and datasets[edit]




See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b c d Tsoumakas, Grigorios; Katakis, Ioannis (2007). "Multi-label classification: an overview". International Journal of Data Warehousing & Mining 3 (3): 1–13. doi:10.4018/jdwm.2007070101. 
  3. ^ Vlahavas, Ioannis (2007). "Random k-labelsets: An ensemble method for multilabel classification". ECML. 
  4. ^ Zhang, M.L.; Zhou, Z.H. (2007). "ML-KNN: A lazy learning approach to multi-label learning". Pattern Recognition 40 (7). 
  5. ^ Madjarov, Gjorgji; Kocev, Dragi; Gjorgjevikj, Dejan; Džeroski, Sašo (2012). "An extensive experimental comparison of methods for multi-label learning". Pattern Recognition 45 (9). 
  6. ^ Zhang, M.L.; Zhou, Z.H. (2006). "Multi-label neural networks with applications to functional genomics and text categorization". IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 18. pp. 1338–1351. 
  7. ^ a b Godbole, Shantanu; Sarawagi, Sunita (2004). "Discriminative methods for multi-labeled classification". Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. pp. 22–30. 
  8. ^ Sechidis, Konstantinos; Tsoumakas, Grigorios; Vlahavas, Ioannis (2011). "On the stratification of multi-label data". ECML PKDD. pp. 145–158. 

Further reading[edit]