A k-nearest neighbor based algorithm for multi-label classification

In multi-label learning, each instance in the training set is associated with a set of labels, and the task is to output a label set whose size is unknown a priori for each unseen instance. In this paper, a multi-label lazy learning approach named ML-kNN is presented, which is derived from the traditional k-nearest neighbor (kNN) algorithm. In detail, for each new instance, its k-nearest neighbors are firstly identified. After that, according to the label sets of these neighboring instances, maximum a posteriori (MAP) principle is utilized to determine the label set for the new instance. Experiments on a real-world multi-label bioinformatic data show that ML-kNN is highly comparable to existing multi-label learning algorithms.