Classifying vaguely labeled data based on evidential fusion

Abstract Classification is one of the fundamental supervised learning tasks which learns classifiers from the given training data and related labels. The quality of labels is important in classification tasks. However, in many real-world scenarios, data annotation is often corrupted, especially when the annotation process is done by humans. Vaguely labeled data is one of the common problems caused by limited domain knowledge or partial data observation. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to classify vaguely labeled data based on evidential fusion. Vaguely labeled data are divided into several small data groups by the proposed valid label-set cover assignment algorithm. Evidence theory is applied to vaguely labeled data classification by regarding each base classifier on a small data group as one piece of evidence. This gives the chance of classifying unseen precise labeled data from related vague labels. Note that our approach is not restricted to any specific classifiers. It can be generalized to any off-the-shelf classification methods with probabilistic outputs. Finally, experiments are conducted on both synthetic data and real-world data with different base classifiers. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance against compared methods.