MLAWSMOTE: Oversampling in Imbalanced Multi-label Classification with Missing Labels by Learning Label Correlation Matrix

Abstract Missing labels in multi-label datasets are a common problem, especially for minority classes, which are more likely to occur. This limitation hinders the performance of classifiers in identifying and extracting information from minority classes. Oversampling is an effective method for addressing imbalanced multi-label problems by generating synthetic instances to create a class-balanced dataset. However, the existing oversampling algorithms mainly focus on the location of the generated data, and there is a lack of design on how to complete the labels of the synthetic data. To address this issue, we propose MLAWSMOTE, a synthetic data generation algorithm based on matrix factorization weights. We introduce a weak supervised learning method in the oversampling method, optimize the weights of features and labels by using label correlation, and iteratively learn the ideal label weights. The mapping relationship between features and labels is learned from the dataset and the label correlation matrix. The oversampling ratio is defined based on the discrepancy between observed labels and the ideal label of synthetic instances. It mitigates the impact of missing minority labels on the model’s predictions. The labeling of synthetic instances is performed based on label prediction, and the potential labeling distribution is complemented. Experimental results on multiple multi-label datasets under different label missing ratios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of ACC, Hamming loss, MacroF1 and MicroF1. In the validation of the four classifiers, MacroF1 decreased by 24.78%, 17.81%, 3.8% and 19.56%, respectively, with the increase of label loss rate. After applying MLAWSMOTE only decreased by 15.79%, 13.63%, 3.78% and 15.21%.