Stable Label-Specific Features Generation for Multi-Label Learning via Mixture-Based Clustering Ensemble

Multi-label learning deals with objects associated with multiple class labels,and aims to induce a predictive model which can assign a set of relevant class labels for an unseen instance.Since each class might possess its own characteristics,the strategy of extracting label-specific features has been widely employed to improve the discrimination process in multi-label learning,where the predictive model is induced based on tailored features specific to each class label instead of the identical instance representations.As a representative approach,LIFT generates label-specific features by conducting clustering analysis.However,its performance may be degraded due to the inherent instability of the single clustering algorithm.To improve this,a novel multi-label learning approach named SENCE(stable label-Specific features gENeration for multi-label learning via mixture-based Clustering Ensemble)is proposed,which stabilizes the generation process of label-specific features via clustering ensemble techniques.Specifically,more stable clustering results are obtained by firstly augmenting the original instance repre-sentation with cluster assignments from base clusters and then fitting a mixture model via the expectation-maximization(EM)algorithm.Extensive experiments on eighteen benchmark data sets show that SENCE performs better than LIFT and other well-established multi-label learning algorithms.