An adaptation of the ML-kNN algorithm to predict the number of classes in hierarchical multi-label classification

Abstract

The classification problems described in the Machine Learning literature usually relate to the classification of data in which each example is associated to a class belonging to a finite set of classes, all at the same level. However, there are classification issues, of a hierarchical nature, where the classes can be either subclasses or super classes of other classes. In many hierarchical problems, one or more examples may be associated with more than one class simultaneously. These problems are known as hierarchical multi-label classification (HMC) problems. In this work, the ML-KNN algorithm was used to predict hierarchical multi-label problems, in order to determine the number of classes that can be assigned to an example. Through the experiments performed on 10 protein function databases and the statistical analysis of the results, it can be shown that the adaptations performed in the ML-KNN algorithm brought significant performance improvements based on the hierarchical precision and recall metrics Hierarchical.