Circular Chain Classifiers

Abstract

Chain Classifiers (CC) are an alternative for multi-label classification that is efficient and provides, in general, good results. However, it is not clear how to define the order of the chain. Different orders tend to produce different outcomes. We propose an extension to chain classifiers called “Circular Chain Classifiers" (CCC), in which the propagation of the classes of the previous binary classifiers is done iteratively in a circular way. After the first cycle, the predictions from the base classifiers are entered as additional attributes to the first one in the chain. This process continues for all the classifiers in the chain, and it is repeated for a prefixed number of cycles or until convergence. Using two datasets, we empirically established that CCC: (i) converges in few iterations (in general, 3 or 4), (ii) the initial order of the chain does not have a significant impact on the results. CCC performance was also compared against binary relevance and chain classifiers producing statistically superior results. The main contribution of CCC is its independence from the preestablished order of the chain, outperforming CC.