Local sets for multi-label instance selection

Abstract

The multi-label classification problem is an extension of traditional (single-label) classification, in which the output is a vector of values rather than a single categorical value. The multi-label problem is therefore a very different and much more challenging one than the single-label problem. Recently, multi-label classification has attracted interest, because of its real-life applications, such as image recognition, bio-informatics, and text categorization, among others. Unfortunately, there are few instance selection techniques capable of processing the data used for these applications. These techniques are also very useful for cleaning and reducing the size of data sets.In single-label problems, the local set of an instance x comprises all instances in the largest hypersphere centered on x, so that they are all of the same class. This concept has been successfully integrated in the design of Iterative Case Filtering, one of the most influential instance selection methods in single-label learning. Unfortunately, the concept that was originally defined for single-label learning cannot be directly applied to multi-label data, as each instance has more than one label.An adaptation of the local set concept to multi-label data is proposed in this paper and its effectiveness is verified in the design of two new algorithms that yielded competitive results. One of the adaptations cleans the data sets, to improve their predictive capabilities, while the other aims to reduce data set sizes. Both are tested and compared against the state-of-the-art instance selection methods available for multi-label learning.