학술논문

HmcNet: A General Approach for Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on. 35(9):8713-8728 Sep, 2023
Subject
Computing and Processing
Task analysis
Prediction algorithms
Physics
Patents
Decision trees
Training
Toy manufacturing industry
Hierarchical multi-label classification
attention mechanism
path selection
Language
ISSN
1041-4347
1558-2191
2326-3865
Abstract
Hierarchical multi-label classification (HMC) deals with the problem of assigning each entity to multiple classes with a taxonomic structure (e.g., tree). Within this structure, classes at different levels tend to have dependencies under the hierarchy constraints. However, most prior studies for HMC tasks tend to ignore the class dependencies within the hierarchy. Moreover, most existing methods generate incoherent predictions and do not satisfy the hierarchy constraint. To this end, based on previously developed HARNN, we propose a general framework, HmcNet, for introducing explicit and implicit class hierarchy constraints to generate coherent predictions. We develop an efficient Prune-based Coherent Prediction (PCP) strategy for the optimal paths selection, which produces coherent predictions in a principled way. HmcNet can be well explained from two perspectives. First, it develops the Hierarchical Attention-based Memory (HAM) unit with implicit class hierarchy constraints to capture class dependencies more intuitively; Second, it subsumes explicit class hierarchy constraints during training and inference phases and generates coherent predictions in a consistent manner. Finally, extensive experimental results on six real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of the HmcNet frameworks. To facilitate future research, our code has been made publicly available.