ProLSFEO-LDL: Prototype Selection and LabelSpecific Feature Evolutionary Optimization for Label Distribution Learning González, Manuel García, Salvador Label distribution learning Evolutionary optimization Protoype selection Label-specific feature Machine learning Label Distribution Learning (LDL) is a general learning framework that assigns an instance to a distribution over a set of labels rather than to a single label or multiple labels. Current LDL methods have proven their effectiveness in many real-life machine learning applications. In LDL problems, instance-based algorithms and particularly the adapted version of the k-nearest neighbors method for LDL (AA-kNN) has proven to be very competitive, achieving acceptable results and allowing an explainable model. However, it suffers from several handicaps: it needs large storage requirements, it is not efficient predicting and presents a low tolerance to noise. The purpose of this paper is to mitigate these effects by adding a data reduction stage. The technique devised, called Prototype selection and Label-Specific Feature Evolutionary Optimization for LDL (ProLSFEO-LDL), is a novel method to simultaneously address the prototype selection and the label-specific feature selection pre-processing techniques. Both techniques pose a complex optimization problem with a huge search space. Therefore, we have proposed a search method based on evolutionary algorithms that allows us to obtain a solution to both problems in a reasonable time. The effectiveness of the proposed ProLSFEO-LDL method is verified on several real-world LDL datasets, showing significant improvements in comparison with using raw datasets. 2020-06-22T12:11:44Z 2020-06-22T12:11:44Z 2020-04 journal article González, M., Cano, J. R., & García, S. (2020). ProLSFEO-LDL: Prototype Selection and Label-Specific Feature Evolutionary Optimization for Label Distribution Learning. Applied Sciences, 10(9), 3089. [doi:10.3390/app10093089] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/62618 10.3390/app10093089 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ open access Atribución 3.0 España MDPI