Updating Correlation-Enhanced Feature Learning for Multi-Label Classification

In the domain of multi-label classification, label correlations play a crucial role in enhancing prediction precision. However, traditional methods heavily depend on ground-truth label sets, which can be incompletely tagged due to the diverse backgrounds of annotators and the significant cost associated with procuring extensive labeled datasets. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel multi-label classification method called updating Correlation-enhanced Feature Learning (uCeFL), which extracts label correlations directly from the data instances, circumventing the dependency on potentially incomplete label sets. uCeFL initially computes a revised label matrix by multiplying the incomplete label matrix with the label correlations extracted from the data matrix. This revised matrix is then utilized to enrich the original data features, enabling a neural network to learn correlation-enhanced representations that capture intricate relationships between data features, labels, and their interactions. Notably, label correlations are not static; they are dynamically updated during the neural network’s training process. Extensive experiments carried out on various datasets emphasize the effectiveness of the proposed approach. By leveraging label correlations within data instances, along with the hierarchical learning capabilities of neural networks, it offers a significant improvement in multi-label classification, even in scenarios with incomplete labels.