Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Collective Multi-Label Classification, Nadia Ghamrawi, Andrew Mccallum

Computer Science Department Faculty Publication Series

Common approaches to multi-label classification learn independent classifiers for each category, and employ ranking or thresholding schemes for classification. Because they do not exploit dependencies between labels, such techniques are only well-suited to problems in which categories are independent. However, in many domains labels are highly interdependent. This paper explores multilabel conditional random field (CRF) classification models that directly parameterize label co-occurrences in multi-label classification. Experiments show that the models outperform their singlelabel counterparts on standard text corpora. Even when multilabels are sparse, the models improve subset classification error by as much as 40%.