Multiclass vs. multilabel fitting - scikit-learn

Question

In scikit-learn tutorials, I found the following paragraphs in the section 'Multiclass vs. multilabel fitting'.
I couldn't understand why the following codes generate the given results.
First
from sklearn.svm import SVC
from sklearn.multiclass import OneVsRestClassifier
from sklearn.preprocessing import LabelBinarizer
X = [[1, 2], [2, 4], [4, 5], [3, 2], [3, 1]]
y = [0, 0, 1, 1, 2]
classif = OneVsRestClassifier(estimator=SVC(random_state=0))
classif.fit(X, y).predict(X)
array([0, 0, 1, 1, 2])
y = LabelBinarizer().fit_transform(y)
classif.fit(X, y).predict(X)
array([[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 0],
[0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0]])
Next
from sklearn.preprocessing import MultiLabelBinarizer
y = [[0, 1], [0, 2], [1, 3], [0, 2, 3], [2, 4]]
y = MultiLabelBinarizer().fit_transform(y)
classif.fit(X, y).predict(X)
array([[1, 1, 0, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 1, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 0, 1, 0],
[1, 0, 1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 1, 0, 0]])

Answer 1

Label binarization in scikit-learn will transform your targets and represent them in a label indicator matrix. This label indicator matrix has the shape (n_samples, n_classes) and is composed as follows:
each row represents a sample
each column represents a class
each element is 1 if the sample is labeled with the class and 0 if not
In your first example, you have a target collection with 5 samples and 3 classes. That's why transforming y with LabelBinarizer results in a 5x3 matrix. In your case, [1, 0, 0] corresponds to class 0, [0, 1, 0] corresponds to class 1 and so forth. Notice that in each row there is only one element set to 1, since each sample can have one label only.
In your next example, you have a target collection with 5 samples and 5 classes. That's why transforming y with MultiLabelBinarizer results in a 5x5 matrix. In your case, [1, 1, 0, 0, 0] corresponds to the multilabel [0, 1], [0, 1, 0, 1, 0] corresponds to the multilabel [1, 3] and so forth. The key difference to the first example is that each row can have multiple elements set to 1, because each sample can have multiple labels/classes.
The predicted values you get follow the very same pattern. They are however not equivalent to the original values in y since your classification model has obviously predicted different values. You can check this with the inverse_transform() of the binarizers:
from sklearn.preprocessing import MultiLabelBinarizer
mlb = MultiLabelBinarizer()
y = np.array([[0, 1], [0, 2], [1, 3], [0, 2, 3], [2, 4]])
y_bin = mlb.fit_transform(y)
# direct transformation
[[1 1 0 0 0]
[1 0 1 0 0]
[0 1 0 1 0]
[1 0 1 1 0]
[0 0 1 0 1]]
# prediction of your classifier
y_pred = np.array([[1, 1, 0, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 1, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 0, 1, 0],
[1, 0, 1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 1, 0, 0]])
# inverting the binarized values to the original classes
y_inv = mlb.inverse_transform(y_pred)
# output
[(0, 1), (0, 2), (1, 3), (0, 2), (0, 2)]