ML²S-SVM: multi-label least-squares support vector machine classifiers

Abstract

Purpose

Image classification is becoming a supporting technology in several image-processing tasks. Due to rich semantic information contained in the images, it is very popular for an image to have several labels or tags. This paper aims to develop a novel multi-label classification approach with superior performance.

Design/methodology/approach

Many multi-label classification problems share two main characteristics: label correlations and label imbalance. However, most of current methods are devoted to either model label relationship or to only deal with unbalanced problem with traditional single-label methods. In this paper, multi-label classification problem is regarded as an unbalanced multi-task learning problem. Multi-task least-squares support vector machine (MTLS-SVM) is generalized for this problem, renamed as multi-label LS-SVM (ML²S-SVM).

Findings

Experimental results on the emotions, scene, yeast and bibtex data sets indicate that the ML²S-SVM is competitive with respect to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of Hamming loss and instance-based F1 score. The values of resulting parameters largely influence the performance of ML²S-SVM, so it is necessary for users to identify proper parameters in advance.

Originality/value

On the basis of MTLS-SVM, a novel multi-label classification approach, ML²S-SVM, is put forward. This method can overcome the unbalanced problem but also explicitly models arbitrary order correlations among labels by allowing multiple labels to share a subspace. In addition, the multi-label classification approach has a wider range of applications. That is to say, it is not limited to the field of image classification.

Citation

Xu, S. and An, X. (2019), "ML²S-SVM: multi-label least-squares support vector machine classifiers", The Electronic Library, Vol. 37 No. 6, pp. 1040-1058. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-09-2019-0207