Shaping the error-reject curve of error correcting output coding systems

Abstract

A common approach in many classification tasks consists in reducing the costs by turning as many errors as possible into rejects. This can be accomplished by introducing a reject rule which, working on the reliability of the decision, aims at increasing the performance of the classification system. When facing multiclass classification, Error Correcting Output Coding is a diffused and successful technique to implement a system by decomposing the original problem into a set of two class problems. The novelty in this paper is to consider different levels where the reject can be applied in the ECOC systems. A study for the behavior of such rules in terms of Error-Reject curves is also proposed and tested on several benchmark datasets. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.