Understanding Partial Multi-label Learning via Mutual Information

To deal with ambiguities in partial multi-label learning (PML), state-of-the-art methods perform disambiguation by identifying ground-truth labels directly. However, there is an essential question:"Can the ground-truth labels be identified precisely?". If yes, "How can the ground-truth labels be found?". This paper provides affirmative answers to these questions. Instead of adopting hand-made heuristic strategy, we propose a novel Mutual Information Label Identification for Partial Multi-Label Learning (MILI-PML), which is derived from a clear probabilistic formulation and could be easily interpreted theoretically from the mutual information perspective, as well as naturally incorporates the feature/label relevancy into consideration. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets clearly demonstrate the superiorities of the proposed MILI-PML.