Ml-rbf: RBF Neural Networks for Multi-Label Learning

Multi-label learning deals with the problem where each instance is associated with multiple labels simultaneously. The task of this learning paradigm is to predict the label set for each unseen instance, through analyzing training instances with known label sets. In this paper, a neural network based multi-label learning algorithm named Ml-rbf is proposed, which is derived from the traditional radial basis function (RBF) methods. Briefly, the first layer of an Ml-rbf neural network is formed by conducting clustering analysis on instances of each possible class, where the centroid of each clustered groups is regarded as the prototype vector of a basis function. After that, second layer weights of the Ml-rbf neural network are learned by minimizing a sum-of-squares error function. Specifically, information encoded in the prototype vectors corresponding to all classes are fully exploited to optimize the weights corresponding to each specific class. Experiments on three real-world multi-label data sets show that Ml-rbf achieves highly competitive performance to other well-established multi-label learning algorithms.