Adaptive Classifier Selection in Large-Scale Hierarchical Classification

Abstract

Going beyond the traditional text classification, involving a few tens of classes, there has been a surge of interest in automatic document categorization in large taxonomies where the number of classes range from hundreds of thousands to millions. Due to the complex nature of the learning problem posed in such scenarios, one needs to adapt the conventional classification schemes to suit this domain. This paper presents a novel approach for classifier selection in large hierarchies, which is based on exploiting training data heterogeneity across the hierarchy. We also present a meta-learning framework for further flexibility in classifier selection. The experimental results demonstrate the applicability of our approach, which achieves accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art and is also significantly faster for prediction.