Using Decision Trees for Comparing Pattern Recognition Feature Sets
Deanne D. Proctor · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 2005
Determination of the best set of features has been acknowledged as one of the most difficult tasks in the pattern recognition process. In this report significance tests on the sort-ordered, sample-size normalized vote distribution of an ensemble of decision trees is introduced as a method of evaluating relative quality of feature sets. Alternative functional forms for feature sets are also examined. Associated standard deviations provide the means to evaluate the effect of the number of folds, the number of classifiers per fold, and the sample size on the resulting classifications. The method is applied to a problem for which a significant portion of the training set cannot be classified unambiguously.