Papers › Bonsai -- Diverse and Shallow Trees for Extreme Multi-label Classification

Bonsai -- Diverse and Shallow Trees for Extreme Multi-label Classification

17 Apr 2019arXiv:1904.08249archive 2025-07-28

Sujay Khandagale, Han Xiao, Rohit Babbar

Extreme multi-label classification (XMC) refers to supervised multi-label learning involving hundreds of thousand or even millions of labels. In this paper, we develop a suite of algorithms, called Bonsai, which generalizes the notion of label representation in XMC, and partitions the labels in the representation space to learn shallow trees. We show three concrete realizations of this label representation space including : (i) the input space which is spanned by the input features, (ii) the output space spanned by label vectors based on their co-occurrence with other labels, and (iii) the joint space by combining the input and output representations. Furthermore, the constraint-free multi-way partitions learnt iteratively in these spaces lead to shallow trees. By combining the effect of shallow trees and generalized label representation, Bonsai achieves the best of both worlds - fast training which is comparable to state-of-the-art tree-based methods in XMC, and much better prediction accuracy, particularly on tail-labels. On a benchmark Amazon-3M dataset with 3 million labels, \bonsai outperforms a state-of-the-art one-vs-rest method in terms of prediction accuracy, while being approximately 200 times faster to train. The code for Bonsai is available at \url{https://github.com/xmc-aalto/bonsai}

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

xmc-aalto/bonsai officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubBSD-3-Clause report
scakc/ConvBonsai-Tree mentioned on GitHubtf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ClassificationExtreme Multi-Label ClassificationGeneral ClassificationMUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATIONMulti-Label ClassificationMulti-Label Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections