A probabilistic decoding approach to multi-class classification

Abstract

In this article, we propose a new method of multi-class classification in the framework of error-correcting output coding (ECOC). Misclassification of each binary classifier is formulated as a bit inversion error with a probabilistic model for each class and dependence between binary classifiers is incorporated into our model, which makes a decoder, a type of Boltzmann machine. Experimental studies using a synthetic dataset and datasets from UCI repository are performed, and the results show that the proposed method is superior to other existing multi-class classification methods.