Discovering and Exploiting Deterministic Label Relationships in Multi-Label Learning

Abstract

This work presents a probabilistic method for enforcing adherence of the marginal probabilities of a multi-label model to automatically discovered deterministic relationships among labels. In particular we focus on discovering two kinds of relationships among the labels. The first one concerns pairwise positive entailment: pairs of labels, where the presence of one implies the presence of the other in all instances of a dataset. The second concerns exclusion: sets of labels that do not coexist in the same instances of the dataset. These relationships are represented as a deterministic Bayesian network. Marginal probabilities are entered as soft evidence in the network and through probabilistic inference become consistent with the discovered knowledge. Our approach offers robust improvements in mean average precision compared to the standard binary relevance approach across all 12 datasets involved in our experiments. The discovery process helps interesting implicit knowledge to emerge, which could be useful in itself.