Improving multi-label classification performance by label constraints

Multi-label classification is an extension of traditional classification problem in which each instance is associated with a set of labels. For some multi-label classification tasks, labels are usually overlapped and correlated, and some implicit constraint rules are existed among the labels. This paper presents an improved multi-label classification method based on label ranking strategy and label constraints. Firstly, one-against-all decomposition technique is used to divide a multilabel classification task into multiple independent binary classification sub-problems. One binary SVM classifier is trained for each label. Secondly, based on training data, label constraint rules are mined by association rule learning method. Thirdly, a correction model based on label constraints is used to correct the probabilistic outputs of SVM classifiers for label ranking. Experiment results on three well-known multi-label benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms some conventional multi-label classification methods.