Hierarchical Maximum Margin Learning for Multi-Class Classification

Due to myriads of classes, designing accurate and efficient classifiers becomes very challenging for multi-class classification. Recent research has shown that class structure learning can greatly facilitate multi-class learning. In this paper, we propose a novel method to learn the class structure for multi-class classification problems. The class structure is assumed to be a binary hierarchical tree. To learn such a tree, we propose a maximum separating margin method to determine the child nodes of any internal node. The proposed method ensures that two classgroups represented by any two sibling nodes are most separable. In the experiments, we evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method over other multi-class classification methods on real world large-scale problems. The results show that the proposed method outperforms benchmark methods in terms of accuracy for most datasets and performs comparably with other class structure learning methods in terms of efficiency for all datasets.