Multi-label classification approach for Quranic verses labeling

Machine learning involves the task of training systems to be able to make decisions without being explicitly programmed. Important among machine learning tasks is classification involving the process of training machines to make predictions from predefined labels. Classification is broadly categorized into three distinct groups: single-label (SL), multi-class, and multi-label (ML) classification. This research work presents an application of a multi-label classification (MLC) technique in automating Quranic verses labeling. MLC has been gaining attention in recent years. This is due to the increasing amount of works based on real-world classification problems of multi-label data. In traditional classification problems, patterns are associated with a single-label from a set of disjoint labels. However, in MLC, an instance of data is associated with a set of labels. In this paper, three standard MLC methods: binary relevance (BR), classifier chain (CC), and label powerset (LP) algorithms are implemented with four baseline classifiers: support vector machine (SVM), naïve Bayes (NB), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and J48. The research methodology adopts the multi-label problem transformation (PT) approach. The results are validated using six conventional performance metrics. These include: hamming loss, accuracy, one error, micro-F1, macro-F1, and avg. precision. From the results, the classifiers effectively achieved above 70% accuracy mark. Overall, SVM achieved the best results with CC and LP algorithms. Keywords Holy Quran; Machine learning; Multi-label classification; Multi-label evaluation metrics; Text classification