FS-MLC: Feature selection for multi-label classification using clustering in feature space

Abstract

Multi-label classification (MLC) has attracted many researchers in the field of machine learning as it has a straightforward problem statement with varied solution approaches. Multi-label classifiers predict multiple labels for a single instance. The problem becomes challenging with the increasing number of features, especially when there are many features and labels which depend on each other. It requires dimensionality reduction before applying any multi-label learning method. This paper introduces a method named FS-MLC (Feature Selection forMulti-Label classification using Clustering in feature-space). It is a wrapper feature selection method that uses clustering to find the similarity among features and example-based precision and recall as the metrics for feature rankings to improve the performance of the associated classifier in terms of sample-based measures. First, clusters are created for features considering them as instances then features from different clusters are selected as the representative of all the features for that cluster. It reduces the number of features as a single feature represents multiple features within a cluster. It neither requires any parameter tuning nor the user threshold for the number of features selected. Extensive experimentation is performed to evaluate the efficacy of these reduced features using nine benchmark MLC datasets on twelve performance measures. The results show an impressive improvement in terms of sample-based precision, recall, and f1-score with up to 23%-93% discarded features.