Causal Label Enhancement

Xinyuan Liu, Jihua Zhu, Qinghai Zheng, Zhongyu Li, Zhiqiang Tian, Mingchen Zhu

Abstract: Label enhancement (LE) is still a challenging task to mitigate the dilemma of the lack of label distribution. Existing LE work typically focuses on primarily formulating a projection between feature space and label distribution space from discriminative model perspective, which preserves the relevance consistency that the sign of recovered label distribution should be consistent with the logical label. Different from previous algorithms, we formulate this problem from a causal perspective and present a novel LE method via the structured causal model (LESCM). Specifically, the proposed LESCM deliberates establishing the causal graph with assuming that label distribution is a cause of feature and logical label, which naturally satisfies the definition of label distribution learning (LDL). With capturing the underlying causal relationships, we can significantly boost the interpretability and identifiability of label enhancement. Meanwhile, except for the relevance consistency, LESCM are encouraged to sustain the order consistency that assigns higher description degree of the recovered label distribution to the positive labels, as compared with the negative labels. Empirically, sufficient experiments on several label distribution learning data sets validate the effectiveness of LESCM.

External IDs:dblp:journals/tkde/LiuZZLTZ25