Partial label learning: Taxonomy, analysis and outlook

Abstract

Partial label learning (PLL) is an emerging framework in weakly supervised machine learning with broad application prospects. It handles the case in which each training example corresponds to a candidate label set and only one label concealed in the set is the ground-truth label. In this paper, we propose a novel taxonomy framework for PLL including four categories: disambiguation strategy, transformation strategy, theory-oriented strategy and extensions. We analyze and evaluate methods in each category and sort out synthetic and real-world PLL datasets which are all hyperlinked to the source data. Future work of PLL is profoundly discussed in this article based on the proposed taxonomy framework.

Keywords: Machine learning; Partial label learning; Partial multi-label learning; Weakly supervised learning.