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There is such a problem: we have to process multi-label classification (assignmet of tags) of text articles, using some pre-labeled training set. But for many texts in the training set, should be assigned more tags, that it was done by their authors.

For example, there is a text about war medicine, and there is assigned only the text "war", and tag "medicine" is omitted.

Are there any common, conventional methods to deal with such data?

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  • $\begingroup$ Semi-supervised learning: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-supervised_learning $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 12:18
  • $\begingroup$ There is usually considered the case, when some data are labeled properly, and some are not labeled at all. $\endgroup$
    – Felix
    Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 12:22
  • $\begingroup$ Which is basically the problem you are dealing with from a per-class perspective. Your example of war medicine is unlabeled from the medicine class' perspective. One way to go would be to treat every binary 1-vs-all classification problem as semi-supervised and use whichever technique you like most. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 12:23
  • $\begingroup$ Well, well, In normal SSL I have some examples, in which I know, that they are NOT "medicine". Here I cannot say it so confidently. $\endgroup$
    – Felix
    Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 12:36
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    $\begingroup$ This is exactly the scenario of PU learning, a branch of semi-supervised learning. The following reference is one of my favorites: cseweb.ucsd.edu/~elkan/posonly.pdf $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 12:39

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Based on the question and your comments, you can consider every 1-vs-all classification problem as a so-called PU learning problem (*P*ositive and *U*nlabeled). PU learning is a branch of semi-supervised learning in which you only have labels of the positive class and (typically a lot of) unlabeled instances.

Every tag is a class in your case. Instances associated with said tag are positive for the associated 1-vs-all classifier, all others are unlabeled. In your example: war medicine is a known positive for the war class and an unlabeled instance for the medicine class.

Here is a simple but comprehensive reference on the subject: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~elkan/posonly.pdf

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