MCut: A Thresholding Strategy for Multi-label Classification

• Published in: Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis XI pp. 172 - 183
• Main Authors: Largeron, Christine, Moulin, Christophe, Géry, Mathias
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2012
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Alternate Decision Tree; Information Retrieval; Support Vector Machine; Text Categorization; Thresholding Strategy
• ISBN: 9783642341557; 3642341551
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-34156-4_17

The multi-label classification is a frequent task in machine learning notably in text categorization. When binary classifiers are not suited, an alternative consists in using a multiclass classifier that provides for each document a score per category and then in applying a thresholding strategy in order to select the set of categories which must be assigned to the document. The common thresholding strategies, such as RCut, PCut and SCut methods, need a training step to determine the value of the threshold. To overcome this limit, we propose a new strategy, called MCut which automatically estimates a value for the threshold. This method does not have to be trained and does not need any parametrization. Experiments performed on two textual corpora, XML Mining 2009 and RCV1 collections, show that the MCut strategy results are on par with the state of the art but MCut is easy to implement and parameter free.