A Novel Hybrid Feature Selection Algorithm for Hierarchical Classification

Feature selection is a widespread preprocessing step in the data mining field. One of its purposes is to reduce the number of original dataset features to improve a predictive model’s performance. Despite the benefits of feature selection for the classification task, to the best of our knowledge, few studies in the literature address feature selection for the hierarchical classification context. This paper proposes a novel feature selection method based on the general variable neighborhood search metaheuristic, combining a filter and a wrapper step, wherein a global model hierarchical classifier evaluates feature subsets. We used twelve datasets from the proteins and images domains to perform computational experiments to validate the effect of the proposed algorithm on classification performance when using two global hierarchical classifiers proposed in the literature. Statistical tests showed that using our method for feature selection led to predictive performances that were consistently better than or equivalent to that obtained by using all features with the benefit of reducing the number of features needed, which justifies its efficiency for the hierarchical classification scenario

Automatic refinement of large-scale cross-domain knowledge graphs

Knowledge graphs are a way to represent complex structured and unstructured information integrated into an ontology, with which one can reason about the existing information to deduce new information or highlight inconsistencies. Knowledge graphs are divided into the terminology box (TBox), also known as ontology, and the assertions box (ABox). The former consists of a set of schema axioms defining classes and properties which describe the data domain. Whereas the ABox consists of a set of facts describing instances in terms of the TBox vocabulary. In the recent years, there have been several initiatives for creating large-scale cross-domain knowledge graphs, both free and commercial, with DBpedia, YAGO, and Wikidata being amongst the most successful free datasets. Those graphs are often constructed with the extraction of information from semi-structured knowledge, such as Wikipedia, or unstructured text from the web using NLP methods. It is unlikely, in particular when heuristic methods are applied and unreliable sources are used, that the knowledge graph is fully correct or complete. There is a tradeoff between completeness and correctness, which is addressed differently in each knowledge graph’s construction approach. There is a wide variety of applications for knowledge graphs, e.g. semantic search and discovery, question answering, recommender systems, expert systems and personal assistants. The quality of a knowledge graph is crucial for its applications. In order to further increase the quality of such large-scale knowledge graphs, various automatic refinement methods have been proposed. Those methods try to infer and add missing knowledge to the graph, or detect erroneous pieces of information. In this thesis, we investigate the problem of automatic knowledge graph refinement and propose methods that address the problem from two directions, automatic refinement of the TBox and of the ABox. In Part I we address the ABox refinement problem. We propose a method for predicting missing type assertions using hierarchical multilabel classifiers and ingoing/ outgoing links as features. We also present an approach to detection of relation assertion errors which exploits type and path patterns in the graph. Moreover, we propose an approach to correction of relation errors originating from confusions between entities. Also in the ABox refinement direction, we propose a knowledge graph model and process for synthesizing knowledge graphs for benchmarking ABox completion methods. In Part II we address the TBox refinement problem. We propose methods for inducing flexible relation constraints from the ABox, which are expressed using SHACL.We introduce an ILP refinement step which exploits correlations between numerical attributes and relations in order to the efficiently learn Horn rules with numerical attributes. Finally, we investigate the introduction of lexical information from textual corpora into the ILP algorithm in order to improve quality of induced class expressions