Set-Valued Prediction in Multi-Class Classification
Thomas Mortier, Marek Wydmuch, Krzysztof Dembczyński, Eyke Hüllermeier, Willem Waegeman · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2019
In cases of uncertainty, a multi-class classifier preferably returns a set of candidate classes instead of predicting a single class label with little guarantee.More precisely, the classifier should strive for an optimal balance between the correctness (the true class is among the candidates) and the precision (the candidates are not too many) of its prediction.We formalize this problem within a general decision-theoretic framework that unifies most of the existing work in this area.In this framework, uncertainty is quantified in terms of conditional class probabilities, and the quality of a predicted set is measured in terms of a utility function.We then address the problem of finding the Bayes-optimal prediction, i.e., the subset of class labels with highest expected utility.