Multi-Dimensional Classification via kNN Feature Augmentation

Abstract

Multi-dimensional classification (MDC) deals with the problem where one instance is associated with multiple class variables, each of which specifies its class membership w.r.t. one specific class space. Existing approaches learn from MDC examples by focusing on modeling dependencies among class variables, while the potential usefulness of manipulating feature space hasn’t been investigated. In this paper, a first attempt towards feature manipulation for MDC is proposed which enriches the original feature space with kNNaugmented features. Specifically, simple counting statistics on the class membership of neighboring MDC examples are used to generate augmented feature vector. In this way, discriminative information from class space is encoded into the feature space to help train the multi-dimensional classification model. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed feature augmentation techniques, extensive experiments over eleven benchmark data sets as well as four state-of-the-art MDC approaches are conducted. Experimental results clearly show that, compared to the original feature space, classification performance of existing MDC approaches can be significantly improved by incorporating kNN-augmented features.