Multi-label Linear Discriminant Analysis

Multi-label problems arise frequently in image and video annotations, and many other related applications such as multi-topic text categorization, music classification, etc. Like other computer vision tasks, multi-label image and video annotations also suffer from the difficulty of high dimensionality because images often have a large number of features. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a well-known method for dimensionality reduction. However, the classical Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) only works for single-label multi-class classifications and cannot be directly applied to multi-label multi-class classifications. It is desirable to naturally generalize the classical LDA to multi-label formulations. At the same time, multi-label data present a new opportunity to improve classification accuracy through label correlations, which are absent in single-label data. In this work, we propose a novel Multi-label Linear Discriminant Analysis (MLDA) method to take advantage of label correlations and explore the powerful classification capability of the classical LDA to deal with multi-label multi-class problems. Extensive experimental evaluations on five public multi-label data sets demonstrate excellent performance of our method.