Towards Enabling Binary Decomposition for Partial Label Learning

Abstract

The task of partial label (PL) learning is to learn a multi-class classifier from training examples each associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one corresponds to the ground-truth label. It is well known that for inducing multi-class predictive model, the most straightforward solution is binary decomposition which works by either one-vs-rest or one-vs-one strategy. Nonetheless, the ground-truth label for each PL training example is concealed in its candidate label set and thus not accessible to the learning algorithm, binary decomposition cannot be directly applied under partial label learning scenario. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to solving partial label learning problem by adapting the popular one-vs-one decomposition strategy. Specifically, one binary classifier is derived for each pair of class labels, where PL training examples with distinct relevancy to the label pair are used to generate the corresponding binary training set. After that, one binary classifier is further derived for each class label by stacking over predictions of existing binary classifiers to improve generalization. Experimental studies on both artificial and real-world PL data sets clearly validate the effectiveness of the proposed binary decomposition approach w.r.t state-of-the-art partial label learning techniques.