Revisiting multi-dimensional classification from a dimension-wise perspective

Real-world objects exhibit intricate semantic properties that can be characterized from a multitude of perspectives, which necessitates the development of a model capable of discerning multiple patterns within data, while concurrently predicting several Labeling Dimensions (LDs) — a task known as Multi-dimensional Classification (MDC). While the class imbalance issue has been extensively investigated within the multi-class paradigm, its study in the MDC context has been limited due to the imbalance shift phenomenon. A sample’s classification as a minor or major class instance becomes ambiguous when it belongs to a minor class in one LD and a major class in another. Previous MDC methodologies predominantly emphasized instance-wise criteria, neglecting prediction capabilities from a dimension aspect, i.e., the average classification performance across LDs. We assert the significance of dimension-wise metrics in real-world MDC applications and introduce two such metrics. Furthermore, we observe imbalanced class distributions within each LD and propose a novel Imbalance-Aware fusion Model (IMAM) for addressing the MDC problem. Specifically, we first decompose the task into multiple multi-class classification problems, creating imbalance-aware deep models for each LD separately. This straightforward method performs well across LDs without sacrificing performance in instance-wise criteria. Subsequently, we employ LD-wise models as multiple teachers and transfer their knowledge across all LDs to a unified student model. Experimental results on several real-world datasets demonstrate that our IMAM approach excels in both instance-wise evaluations and the proposed dimension-wise metrics.