Augmenting naive Bayes for ranking

Naive Bayes is an effective and efficient learning algorithm in classification. In many applications, however, an accurate ranking of instances based on the class probability is more desirable. Unfortunately, naive Bayes has been found to produce poor probability estimates. Numerous techniques have been proposed to extend naive Bayes for better classification accuracy, of which selective Bayesian classifiers (SBC) (Langley & Sage, 1994), tree-augmented naive Bayes (TAN) (Friedman et al., 1997), NBTree (Kohavi, 1996), boosted naive Bayes (Elkan, 1997), and AODE (Webb et al., 2005) achieve remarkable improvement over naive Bayes in terms of classification accuracy. An interesting question is: Do these techniques also produce accurate ranking? In this paper, we first conduct a systematic experimental study on their efficacy for ranking. Then, we propose a new approach to augmenting naive Bayes for generating accurate ranking, called hidden naive Bayes (HNB). In an HNB, a hidden paren...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICML
• Authors: Harry Zhang, Liangxiao Jiang, Jiang Su
• Keywords: Hidden Naive Bayes, ICML 2005, Machine Learning, Naive Bayes, Tree-augmented Naive Bayes