Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, p. 15-26, 2015
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20248-8_2
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Structured taxonomies characterize several real world problems, ranging from text categorization, to video annotation and protein function prediction. In this context “flat” learning methods may introduce inconsistent predictions, while structured output-aware learning methods can improve the accuracy of the predictions by exploiting the hierarchical relationships between classes. We propose a novel hierarchical ensemble method able to provide theoretically guaranteed consistent predictions for any Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-structured taxonomy, and consequently also for any taxonomy structured according to a tree. Results with a complex real-world DAG-structured taxonomy involving about one thousand classes and twenty thousand of examples show that the proposed hierarchical ensemble approach significantly improves flat methods, especially in terms of precision/recall curves.