Pairwise Neural Network Classifiers with Probabilistic Outputs
David Jonathan Price, Stefan Knerr, L. Personnaz, Gérard Dreyfus, L��on Personnaz G��rard Dreyfus · 1994
Multi-class classification problems can be efficiently solved by partitioning the original problem into sub-problems involving only two classes: for each pair of classes, a (potentially small) neural network is trained using only the data of these two classes. We show how to combine the outputs of the two-class neural networks in order to obtain posterior probabilities for the class decisions. The resulting probabilistic pairwise classifier is part of a handwriting recognition system which is currently applied to check reading. We present results on real world data bases and show that, from a practical point of view, these results compare favorably to other neural network approaches. 1 Introduction Generally, a pattern classifier consists of two main parts: a feature extractor and a classification algorithm. Both parts have the same ultimate goal, namely to transform a given input pattern into a representation that is easily interpretable as a class decision. In the case of feedforwar...