Reducing multiclass to binary by coupling probability estimates

This paper presents a method for obtaining class membership probability estimates for multiclass classification problems by coupling the probability estimates produced by binary classifiers. This is an extension for arbitrary code matrices of a method due to Hastie and Tibshirani for pairwise coupling of probability estimates. Experimental results with Boosted Naive Bayes show that our method produces calibrated class membership probability estimates, while having similar classification accuracy as loss-based decoding, a method for obtaining the most likely class that does not generate probability estimates.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: NIPS
• Authors: B. Zadrozny
• Keywords: Class Membership Probability, Membership Probability Estimates, NIPS 2001, NIPS 2007, Probability Estimates