Improving SVM based multi-label classification by using label relationship

This paper proposes an improved SVM based multi-label classification method by using relationship among labels. Following a traditional multi-label solution, binary relevance (BR) method is first used to decompose the multi-label classification problem into multiple binary classification sub-problems, each of which is solved by an SVM classifier. By using Platt´s sigmoid technique, each SVM classifier gives probability output for the following correction. A probability model is introduced to estimate the relationship among labels. The extracted label relationship is then applied to correct the outputs of SVM classifiers, in which a dynamic weight strategy is further introduced. Numerical experiments on widely used benchmark datasets show that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of multi-label classification when compared with traditional BR method and some other conventional multi-label classification methods.