Label distribution learning by maintaining label ranking relation

Abstract

Label distribution learning (LDL) is a novel machine learning paradigm that can be seen as an extension of multi-label learning (MLL). Compared with MLL, the advantages of LDL are reflected in the following perspectives: (1) the label distribution gives the relevance description of each label to unknown instances in quantitative terms; (2) the distribution implicitly gives the relevance intensities relation of different labels to a particular instance in qualitative terms, i.e., the label ranking relation. All existing LDL models aim to fit the ground-truth label distribution by quantitatively minimizing the distance between distributions or maximizing the similarity between distributions, which only uses the first advantage of the label distribution but ignores the label ranking relation, which may lose some useful semantic information implied in the label distribution, thus reducing the performance of LDL. Therefore, we propose a novel algorithm to solve this problem by introducing the ranking loss function to LDL. In addition, in order to evaluate the LDL algorithms more comprehensively and verify that the ranking loss is beneficial for keeping the label ranking relation, we also introduce two popular ranking evaluation metrics for LDL. The experimental results on 13 real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.