Abstract:As a new learning paradigm to solve the problem of label ambiguity, label distribution learning (LDL) has received much attention in recent years. To further improve the prediction performance of LDL, this study proposes an LDL based on deep forest and heterogeneous ensemble (LDLDF), which uses the cascade structure of deep forest to simulate deep learning models with multi-layer processing structure and combines multiple heterogeneous classifiers in the cascade layer to increase the diversity of ensemble. Compared with other existing LDL methods, LDLDF can process information layer by layer and learn better feature representations to mine rich semantic information in data, and it has better representation learning ability and generalization ability. In addition, by considering the degradation problem of deep models, LDLDF adopts a layer feature reuse mechanism to reduce the training error of the model, which effectively utilizes the prediction ability of each layer in the deep model. Sufficient experimental results show that LDLDF is superior to other methods.