Comparing logistic regression, neural networks, C5.0 and M5′ classification techniques

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to compare the prediction accuracies obtained using logistic regression, neural networks (NN), C5.0 and M5′ classification techniques on 4 freely available data sets. For this a feedforward neural network with a single hidden layer and using back propagation is built using a new algorithm. The results show that the training accuracies obtained using the new algorithm are better than that obtained using N2C2S algorithm. The cross-validation accuracies and the test prediction accuracies obtained by using both the algorithms are not statistically significantly different. Due to this and also since it is easy to understand and implement than N2C2S algorithm, the proposed algorithm should be preferred than the N2C2S algorithm. Along with this 3 different methods of obtaining weights for neural networks are also compared. The classification results show that NN is better than logistic regression over 2 data sets, equivalent in performance over 2 data sets and has low performance than logistic regression in case of 1 data set. It is observed that M5′ is a better classification technique than other techniques over 1 dataset. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.