Multi-label classification by exploiting label correlations

Nowadays, multi-label classification methods are of increasing interest in the areas such as text categorization, image annotation and protein function classification. Due to the correlation among the labels, traditional single-label classification methods are not directly applicable to the multi-label classification problem. This paper presents two novel multi-label classification algorithms based on the variable precision neighborhood rough sets, called multi-label classification using rough sets (MLRS) and MLRS using local correlation (MLRS-LC). The proposed algorithms consider two important factors that affect the accuracy of prediction, namely the correlation among the labels and the uncertainty that exists within the mapping between the feature space and the label space. MLRS provides a global view at the label correlation while MLRS-LC deals with the label correlation at the local level. Given a new instance, MLRS determines its location and then computes the probabilities of labels according to its location. The MLRS-LC first finds out its topic and then the probabilities of new instance belonging to each class is calculated in related topic. A series of experiments reported for seven multi-label datasets show that MLRS and MLRS-LC achieve promising performance when compared with some well-known multi-label learning algorithms. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.