Bayesian models for Large-scale Hierarchical Classification

Siddharth Gopal, Yiming Yang, Bing Bai, Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil
2012 Neural Information Processing Systems  
A challenging problem in hierarchical classification is to leverage the hierarchical relations among classes for improving classification performance. An even greater challenge is to do so in a manner that is computationally feasible for large scale problems. This paper proposes a set of Bayesian methods to model hierarchical dependencies among class labels using multivariate logistic regression. Specifically, the parent-child relationships are modeled by placing a hierarchical prior over the
more » ... ildren nodes centered around the parameters of their parents; thereby encouraging classes nearby in the hierarchy to share similar model parameters. We present variational algorithms for tractable posterior inference in these models, and provide a parallel implementation that can comfortably handle largescale problems with hundreds of thousands of dimensions and tens of thousands of classes. We run a comparative evaluation on multiple large-scale benchmark datasets that highlights the scalability of our approach and shows improved performance over the other state-of-the-art hierarchical methods.
dblp:conf/nips/GopalYBN12 fatcat:dhb2ovrk3vadjivyydjxsv5g4y