A lazy feature selection method for multi-label classification

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
Rafael B. Pereira ◽  
Alexandre Plastino ◽  
Bianca Zadrozny ◽  
Luiz H.C. Merschmann

In many important application domains, such as text categorization, biomolecular analysis, scene or video classification and medical diagnosis, instances are naturally associated with more than one class label, giving rise to multi-label classification problems. This has led, in recent years, to a substantial amount of research in multi-label classification. More specifically, feature selection methods have been developed to allow the identification of relevant and informative features for multi-label classification. This work presents a new feature selection method based on the lazy feature selection paradigm and specific for the multi-label context. Experimental results show that the proposed technique is competitive when compared to multi-label feature selection techniques currently used in the literature, and is clearly more scalable, in a scenario where there is an increasing amount of data.

Author(s):  
E. MONTAÑÉS ◽  
J. R. QUEVEDO ◽  
E. F. COMBARRO ◽  
I. DÍAZ ◽  
J. RANILLA

Feature Selection is an important task within Text Categorization, where irrelevant or noisy features are usually present, causing a lost in the performance of the classifiers. Feature Selection in Text Categorization has usually been performed using a filtering approach based on selecting the features with highest score according to certain measures. Measures of this kind come from the Information Retrieval, Information Theory and Machine Learning fields. However, wrapper approaches are known to perform better in Feature Selection than filtering approaches, although they are time-consuming and sometimes infeasible, especially in text domains. However a wrapper that explores a reduced number of feature subsets and that uses a fast method as evaluation function could overcome these difficulties. The wrapper presented in this paper satisfies these properties. Since exploring a reduced number of subsets could result in less promising subsets, a hybrid approach, that combines the wrapper method and some scoring measures, allows to explore more promising feature subsets. A comparison among some scoring measures, the wrapper method and the hybrid approach is performed. The results reveal that the hybrid approach outperforms both the wrapper approach and the scoring measures, particularly for corpora whose features are less scattered over the categories.


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