Binary relevance efficacy for multilabel classification

• Published in: Progress in artificial intelligence Vol. 1; no. 4; pp. 303 - 313
• Main Authors: Luaces, Oscar, Díez, Jorge, Barranquero, José, del Coz, Juan José, Bahamonde, Antonio
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer-Verlag 01.12.2012
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Computational Intelligence; Computer Imaging; Computer Science; Control; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Mechatronics; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Pattern Recognition and Graphics; Regular Paper; Robotics; Vision; Multilabel classification; Synthetic datasets; Label dependency; Binary relevance
• ISSN: 2192-6352; 2192-6360
• DOI: 10.1007/s13748-012-0030-x

The goal of multilabel (ML) classification is to induce models able to tag objects with the labels that better describe them. The main baseline for ML classification is binary relevance (BR), which is commonly criticized in the literature because of its label independence assumption. Despite this fact, this paper discusses some interesting properties of BR, mainly that it produces optimal models for several ML loss functions. Additionally, we present an analytical study of ML benchmarks datasets and point out some shortcomings. As a result, this paper proposes the use of synthetic datasets to better analyze the behavior of ML methods in domains with different characteristics. To support this claim, we perform some experiments using synthetic data proving the competitive performance of BR with respect to a more complex method in difficult problems with many labels, a conclusion which was not stated by previous studies.