Hierarchical Multilabel Classification Trees for Gene Function Prediction

Prediction of gene function is a so-called hierarchical multilabel classification (HMC) task: a single instance can be labelled with multiple classes rather than just one (i.e., a gene can have multiple functions), and these classes are organized in a hierarchy. Many machine learning methods focus on learning predictive models with a single target variable. One can then learn to predict all classes separately and combine the predictions afterwards.