Title: Large-Scale Online Semantic Indexing of Biomedical Articles via an Ensemble of Multi-Label Classification Models,
Abstract: Background: In this paper we present the approaches and methods employed in
order to deal with a large scale multi-label semantic indexing task of
biomedical papers. This work was mainly implemented within the context of the
BioASQ challenge of 2014. Methods: The main contribution of this work is a
multi-label ensemble method that incorporates a McNemar statistical
significance test in order to validate the combination of the constituent
machine learning algorithms. Some secondary contributions include a study on
the temporal aspects of the BioASQ corpus (observations apply also to the
BioASQ's super-set, the PubMed articles collection) and the proper adaptation
of the algorithms used to deal with this challenging classification task.
Results: The ensemble method we developed is compared to other approaches in
experimental scenarios with subsets of the BioASQ corpus giving positive
results. During the BioASQ 2014 challenge we obtained the first place during
the first batch and the third in the two following batches. Our success in the
BioASQ challenge proved that a fully automated machine-learning approach, which
does not implement any heuristics and rule-based approaches, can be highly
competitive and outperform other approaches in similar challenging contexts.