ART-based Neural Networks for Multi-Label Classification

Abstract

Multi-label classification is an active and rapidly developing research area of data analysis. It becomes increasingly important in such fields as gene function prediction, text classification or web mining. This task corresponds to classification of instances labeled by multiple classes rather than just one. Traditionally, it was solved by learning independent binary classifiers for each class and combining their outputs to obtain multi-label predictions. Alternatively, a classifier can be directly trained to predict a label set of an unknown size for each unseen instance. Recently, several direct multi-label machine learning algorithms have been proposed. This paper presents a novel approach based on ART (Adaptive Resonance Theory) neural networks. The Fuzzy ARTMAP and ARAM algorithms were modified in order to improve their multi-label classification performance and were evaluated on benchmark datasets. Comparison of experimental results with the results of other multi-label classifiers shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.