Disentangled Variational Autoencoder based Multi-Label Classification with Covariance-Aware Multivariate Probit Model

Disentangled Variational Autoencoder based Multi-Label Classification with Covariance-Aware Multivariate Probit Model

Junwen Bai, Shufeng Kong, Carla Gomes

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Special track on AI for CompSust and Human well-being. Pages 4313-4321. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/595

Multi-label classification is the challenging task of predicting the presence and absence of multiple targets, involving representation learning and label correlation modeling. We propose a novel framework for multi-label classification, Multivariate Probit Variational AutoEncoder (MPVAE), that effectively learns latent embedding spaces as well as label correlations. MPVAE learns and aligns two probabilistic embedding spaces for labels and features respectively. The decoder of MPVAE takes in the samples from the embedding spaces and models the joint distribution of output targets under a Multivariate Probit model by learning a shared covariance matrix. We show that MPVAE outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on important computational sustainability applications as well as on other application domains, using public real-world datasets. MPVAE is further shown to remain robust under noisy settings. Lastly, we demonstrate the interpretability of the learned covariance by a case study on a bird observation dataset.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Multi-instance;Multi-label;Multi-view learning
Machine Learning: Deep Generative Models
Uncertainty in AI: Approximate Probabilistic Inference
Machine Learning: Interpretability