An Ensemble of Bayesian Networks for Multilabel Classification

Abstract

We present a novel approach for multilabel classification based on an ensemble of Bayesian networks. The class variables are connected by a tree; each model of the ensemble uses a different class as root of the tree. We assume the features to be conditionally independent given the classes, thus generalizing the naive Bayes assumption to the multiclass case. This assumption allows us to optimally identify the correlations between classes and features; such correlations are moreover shared across all models of the ensemble. Inferences are drawn from the ensemble via logarithmic opinion pooling. To minimize Hamming loss, we compute the marginal probability of the classes by running standard inference on each Bayesian network in the ensemble, and then pooling the inferences. To instead minimize the subset 0/1 loss, we pool the joint distributions of each model and cast the problem as a MAP inference in the corresponding graphical model. Experiments show that the approach is competitive with state-of-the-art methods for multilabel classification.