Generalized test utilities for long-tail performance in extreme multi-label classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Schultheis, Erik, Wydmuch, Marek, Kotłowski, Wojciech, Babbar, Rohit, Dembczyński, Krzysztof
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Schultheis, Erik
Wydmuch, Marek
Kotłowski, Wojciech
Babbar, Rohit
Dembczyński, Krzysztof
author_facet Schultheis, Erik
Wydmuch, Marek
Kotłowski, Wojciech
Babbar, Rohit
Dembczyński, Krzysztof
contents Extreme multi-label classification (XMLC) is the task of selecting a small subset of relevant labels from a very large set of possible labels. As such, it is characterized by long-tail labels, i.e., most labels have very few positive instances. With standard performance measures such as precision@k, a classifier can ignore tail labels and still report good performance. However, it is often argued that correct predictions in the tail are more "interesting" or "rewarding," but the community has not yet settled on a metric capturing this intuitive concept. The existing propensity-scored metrics fall short on this goal by confounding the problems of long-tail and missing labels. In this paper, we analyze generalized metrics budgeted "at k" as an alternative solution. To tackle the challenging problem of optimizing these metrics, we formulate it in the expected test utility (ETU) framework, which aims to optimize the expected performance on a fixed test set. We derive optimal prediction rules and construct computationally efficient approximations with provable regret guarantees and robustness against model misspecification. Our algorithm, based on block coordinate ascent, scales effortlessly to XMLC problems and obtains promising results in terms of long-tail performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_05081
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalized test utilities for long-tail performance in extreme multi-label classification
Schultheis, Erik
Wydmuch, Marek
Kotłowski, Wojciech
Babbar, Rohit
Dembczyński, Krzysztof
Machine Learning
Extreme multi-label classification (XMLC) is the task of selecting a small subset of relevant labels from a very large set of possible labels. As such, it is characterized by long-tail labels, i.e., most labels have very few positive instances. With standard performance measures such as precision@k, a classifier can ignore tail labels and still report good performance. However, it is often argued that correct predictions in the tail are more "interesting" or "rewarding," but the community has not yet settled on a metric capturing this intuitive concept. The existing propensity-scored metrics fall short on this goal by confounding the problems of long-tail and missing labels. In this paper, we analyze generalized metrics budgeted "at k" as an alternative solution. To tackle the challenging problem of optimizing these metrics, we formulate it in the expected test utility (ETU) framework, which aims to optimize the expected performance on a fixed test set. We derive optimal prediction rules and construct computationally efficient approximations with provable regret guarantees and robustness against model misspecification. Our algorithm, based on block coordinate ascent, scales effortlessly to XMLC problems and obtains promising results in terms of long-tail performance.
title Generalized test utilities for long-tail performance in extreme multi-label classification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05081