Multiclass vs Multilabel classification

Samar Bashath
2 min readAug 23, 2020

Multiclass and Multilabel text classification can confuse even the intermediate developer. Here is a simple definition with example of each one.

But let’s start by Binary classification

Binary classification

Sample takes only one label out of two classes. Will sea an example of small data taken from amazon reviews data set

If you look into the table, you will see that we can only classify the review either positive or negative.

Multiclass classification

Sample takes only one label out of number of classes. Will see an example of small data taken from movies reviews data set.

Here the movie rated from 2 to 5. each movie will have only one label (2, 3, 4 or 5).

Multilabel classification

Sample takes more than one label out of number of available classes. Let’s see an example.

So here the movie may take more than one genre. The movie could be comedy and Fantasy in the same time.

Hope you now know the difference. I look forward to hear any feedback or questions.

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