Matrix Factorization for Identifying Noisy Labels of Multi-label Instances

摘要

Current effort on multi-label learning generally assumes that the given labels are noise-free. However, obtaining noise-free labels is quite difficult and often impractical. In this paper, we study how to identify a subset of relevant labels from a set of candidate ones given as annotations to instances, and introduce a matrix factorization based method called MF-INL. It first decomposes the original instance-label association matrix into two low-rank matrices using nonnegative matrix factorization with feature-based and label-based constraints to retain the geometric structure of instances and label correlations. MF-INL then reconstructs the association matrix using the product of the decomposed matrices, and identifies associations with the lowest confidence as noisy associations. An empirical study on real-world multi-label datasets with injected noisy labels shows that MF-INL can identify noisy labels more accurately than other related solutions and is robust to input parameters. We empirically demonstrate that both feature-based and label-based constraints contribute to boosting the performance of MF-INL.