A framework to generate synthetic multi-label datasets

Abstract

A controlled environment based on known properties of the dataset used by a learning algorithm is useful to empirically evaluate machine learning algorithms. Synthetic (artificial) datasets are used for this purpose. Although there are publicly available frameworks to generate synthetic single-label datasets, this is not the case for multi-label datasets, in which each instance is associated with a set of labels usually correlated. This work presents Mldatagen, a multi-label dataset generator framework we have implemented, which is publicly available to the community. Currently, two strategies have been implemented in Mldatagen: hypersphere and hypercube. For each label in the multi-label dataset, these strategies randomly generate a geometric shape (hypersphere or hypercube), which is populated with points (instances) randomly generated. Afterwards, each instance is labeled according to the shapes it belongs to, which defines its multi-label. Experiments with a multi-label classification algorithm in six synthetic datasets illustrate the use of Mldatagen.