Active learning algorithms for multi-label data

Abstract

Active learning is an iterative supervised learning task where learning algorithms can actively query an oracle, i.e. a human annotator that understands the nature of the pro blem, for labels. As the learner is allowed to interactively choose the data from which it learns, it is expected that the learner will perform better with less training. The active learning approach is appropriate to machine learning applications where training labels are costly to obtain but unlabeled data is abundant. Although active learning has been widely considered for single-label learning, this is not the case for multi-label learning, where objects can have more than one class labels and a multi-label learner is trained to assign multiple labels simultaneously to an object. We discuss the key issues that need to be considered in pool-based multi-label active learning and discuss how existing solutions in the literature deal with each of these issues. We further empirically study the performance of the existing solutions, after implementing them in a common framework, on two multi-label datasets with different characteristics and under two different applications settings (transductive, inductive). We find out interesting results that we attribute to the properties of, mainly, the data sets, and, secondarily, the application settings.