Discernibility Concept in Classification Problems
Zacharias Voulgaris · 2009
The main idea behind this project is that the pattern classification process can be enhanced by taking into account the geometry of class structure in datasets of interest. In contrast to previous work in the literature, this research not only develops a measure of discernibility of individual patterns but also consistently applies it to various stages of the classification process. The applications of the discernibility concept cover a wide range of issues from pre-processing to the actual classification and beyond that. Specifically, we apply it for: (a) finding feature subsets of similar classification quality (applicable in diverse ensembles), (b) feature selection, (c) data reduction, (d) reject option, and (e) enhancing the k-NN classifier. Also, a number of auxiliary algorithms and measures are developed to facilitate the proposed methodology. Experiments have been carried out using datasets of the University of California at Irvine (UCI) repository. The experiments provide numerical evidence that the proposed approach does improve the performance of various classifiers. This, together with its simplicity renders it a novel,