Hierarchical multilabel classification based on path evaluation

Multi-label classification assigns more than one label for each instance; when the labels are ordered in a predefined structure, the task is called Hierarchical Multi-label Classification (HMC). In HMC there are global and local approaches. Global approaches treat the problem as a whole but tend to explode with large datasets. Local approaches divide the problem into local subproblems, but usually do not exploit the information of the hierarchy. This paper addresses the problem of HMC for both tree and Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) structures whose labels do not necessarily reach a leaf node. A local classifier per parent node is trained incorporating the prediction of the parent(s) node(s) as an additional attribute to include the relations between classes. In the classification phase, the branches with low probability to occur are pruned, performing non-mandatory leaf node prediction. Our method evaluates each possible path from the root of the hierarchy, taking into account the prediction value and the level of the nodes; selecting the path (or paths in the case of DAGs) with the highest score. We tested our method with 20 datasets with tree and DAG structured hierarchies against a number of state-of-the-art methods. Our method proved to obtain superior results when dealing with deep and populated hierarchies.