Multilabel Classification with R Package mlr

Multilabel classification is a classification problem where multiple target labels can be assigned to each observation instead of only one, like in multiclass classification. It can be regarded as a special case of multivariate classification or multi-target prediction problems, for which the scale of each response variable can be of any kind, for example nominal, ordinal or interval. Originally, multilabel classification was used for text classification (McCallum, 1999; Schapire and Singer, 2000) and is now used in several applications in different research fields. For example, in image classification, a photo can belong to the classes mountain and sunset simultaneously. Zhang and Zhou (2008) and others (Boutell et al., 2004) used multilabel algorithms to classify scenes on images of natural environments.