Multilabel Consensus Classification

Abstract

In the era of big data, a large amount of noisy and incomplete data can be collected from multiple sources for prediction tasks. Combining multiple models or data sources helps to counteract the effects of low data quality and the bias of any single model or data source, and thus can improve the robustness and the performance of predictive models. Out of privacy, storage and bandwidth considerations, in certain circumstances one has to combine the predictions from multiple models or data sources without accessing the raw data. Consensus-based prediction combination algorithms are effective for such situations. However, current research on prediction combination focuses on the single label setting, where an instance can have one and only one label. Nonetheless, data nowadays are usually multilabeled, such that more than one label have to be predicted at the same time. Direct applications of existing prediction combination methods to multilabel settings can lead to degenerated performance. In this paper, we address the challenges of combining predictions from multiple multilabel classifiers and propose two novel algorithms, MLCM-r (MultiLabel Consensus Maximization for ranking) and MLCM-a (MLCM for microAUC). These algorithms can capture label correlations that are common in multilabel classifications, and optimize corresponding performance metrics. Experimental results on popular multilabel classification tasks verify the theoretical analysis and effectiveness of the proposed methods.