Effective active learning strategy for multi-label learning

Data labelling is commonly an expensive process that requires expert handling. In multi-label data, data labelling is further complicated owing to the experts must label several times each example, as each example belongs to various categories. Active learning is concerned with learning accurate classifiers by choosing which examples will be labelled, reducing the labelling effort and the cost of training an accurate model. The main challenge in performing multi-label active learning is designing effective strategies that measure the informative potential of unlabelled examples across all labels. This paper presents a new active learning strategy for working on multi-label data. Two uncertainty measures based on the base classifier predictions and the inconsistency of a predicted label set, respectively, were defined to select the most informative examples. The proposed strategy was compared to several state-of-the-art strategies on a large number of datasets. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposal for better multi-label active learning. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.