Alignment Based Kernel Selection for Multi-Label Learning

Abstract

Kernel based methods are increasingly being used for data modeling because of their conceptual simplicity and outstanding performance on many learning tasks. And kernel alignment, which is usually employed to select particular kernel for a learning task, is an effective quantity to measure the degree of agreement between a kernel and a learning task. However, the existing kernel alignment methods are usually developed for single-label classification problems. In this paper, we consider kernel alignment for multi-label learning to address the problem of kernel selection. Our basic idea is that, firstly an ideal kernel is presented in terms of multiple labels. Then kernel is selected by selecting the parameters of a linear combination of base kernels through maximizing the alignment value between the combined kernel and ideal kernel, and the selected kernel is employed in the binary relevance approach for multi-label learning to construct SVMs as classifiers. Furthermore, our proposed method is improved by considering local kernel alignment criterion. Our idea of selecting kernels by kernel alignment for multi-label learning is experimentally demonstrated to be effective in terms of classification accuracy.