Incremental Class Learning for Hierarchical Classification

Objects can be described in hierarchical semantics, and people also perceive them this way. It leads to the need for hierarchical classification in machine learning. On the other hand, when a new data that belongs to a new class is given, the existing classification methods should be retrained for all data including the new data. To deal with these issues, we propose an adaptive resonance theory-supervised predictive mapping for hierarchical classification (ARTMAP-HC) network that allows incremental class learning for raw data without normalization in advance. Our proposed ARTMAP-HC is composed of hierarchically stacked modules, and each module incorporates two fuzzy ARTMAP networks. Regardless of the level of the class hierarchy and the number of classes for each level, ARTMAP-HC is able to incrementally learn sequentially added input data belonging to new classes. By using a novel online normalization process, ARTMAP-HC can classify the new data without prior knowledge of the maximum value of the dataset. By adopting the prior labels appending process, the class dependency between class hierarchy levels is reflected in ARTMAP-HC. The effectiveness of the proposed ARTMAP-HC is validated through experiments on hierarchical classification datasets. To demonstrate the applicability, ARTMAP-HC is applied to a multimedia recommendation system for digital storytelling.