Clustered intrinsic label correlations for multi-label classification

Currently a consensus on multi-label classification is to exploit label correlations for performance improvement. Many approaches build one classifier for each label based on the one-versus-all strategy, and integrate classifiers by enforcing a regularization term on the global weights to exploit label correlations. However, this strategy might be suboptimal since it may be only part of the global weights that support the assumption. This paper proposes clustered intrinsic label correlations for multi-label classification (CILC), which extends traditional support vector machine to the multi-label setting. The predictive function of each classifier consists of two components: one component is the common information among all labels, and the other component is a label-specific one which highly depends on the corresponding label. The label-specific one representing the intrinsic label correlations is regularized by clustered structure assumption. The appealing features of the proposed method are that it separates the common information and the label-specific information of the labels and utilizes clustered structures among labels represented by the label-specific parts. The practical multi-label classification problems can be directly solved by the proposed CILC method, such as text categorization, image annotation and sentiment analysis. Experiments across five data sets validate the effectiveness of CILC, compared with six well-established multi-label classification algorithms.