Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2022, Vol. 33 ›› Issue (5): 1043-1051.doi: 10.23919/JSEE.2022.000102

• ELECTRONICS TECHNOLOGY • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Label correlation for partial label learning

Lingchi GE(), Min FANG*(), Haikun LI(), Bo CHEN()   

  1. 1 School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
  • Received:2021-05-10 Online:2022-10-27 Published:2022-10-27
  • Contact: Min FANG E-mail:15109285306@163.com;fanglabtg@163.com;haikun1990@163.com;bchen_0314@stu.xidian.edu.cn
  • About author:|GE Lingchi was born in 1997. He received his B.S. degree from Chang’an University, Xi’an, China, in 2018. He is currently pursuing his M.S. degree in computer science at Xidian University, Xi’an, China. His research interests are pattern recognition, partial label learning, and multi-label learning. E-mail: 15109285306@163.com||FANG Min was born in 1965. She received her B.S. degree in computer control, M.S. degree in computer software engineering, and Ph.D. degree in computer application from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in 1986, 1991, and 2004, respectively, where she is currently a professor. Her research interests include intelligent information process, multi-agent system, and network technology. E-mail: fanglabtg@163.com||LI Haikun was born in 1990. He received his M.S. degree from Yunnan University, Kunming, China, in 2017. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in technology of computer application at Xidian University, Xi’an, China. His research interests include pattern recognition, machine learning, and partial-label learning. E-mail: haikun1990@163.com||CHEN Bo was born in 1993. He received his B.S. degree in 2014 from Xi’an University of Post & Telecomunications, Xi’an, China. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Xidian University, Xi’an, China. His research interests include pattern recognition, machine learning, and time series. E-mail: bchen_0314@stu.xidian.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62176197;61806155) and the National Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (2020GY-062).

Abstract:

Partial label learning aims to learn a multi-class classifier, where each training example corresponds to a set of candidate labels among which only one is correct. Most studies in the label space have only focused on the difference between candidate labels and non-candidate labels. So far, however, there has been little discussion about the label correlation in the partial label learning. This paper begins with a research on the label correlation, followed by the establishment of a unified framework that integrates the label correlation, the adaptive graph, and the semantic difference maximization criterion. This work generates fresh insight into the acquisition of the learning information from the label space. Specifically, the label correlation is calculated from the candidate label set and is utilized to obtain the similarity of each pair of instances in the label space. After that, the labeling confidence for each instance is updated by the smoothness assumption that two instances should be similar outputs in the label space if they are close in the feature space. At last, an effective optimization program is utilized to solve the unified framework. Extensive experiments on artificial and real-world data sets indicate the superiority of our proposed method to state-of-art partial label learning methods.

Key words: pattern recognition, partial label learning, label correlation, disambiguation