Category Trees - Classifiers that Branch on Category

Abstract

This paper presents a batch classifier that splits a dataset into tree branches depending on the category type. It has been improved from the earlier version and fixed a mistake in the earlier paper. Two important changes have been made. The first is to represent each category with a separate classifier. Each classifier then classifies its own subset of data rows, using batch input values to create the centroid and also represent the category itself. If the classifier contains data from more than one category however, it needs to create new classifiers for the incorrect data. The second change therefore is to allow the classifier to branch to new layers when there is a split in the data, and create new classifiers there for the data rows that are incorrectly classified. Each layer can therefore branch like a tree - not for distinguishing features, but for distinguishing categories. The paper then suggests a further innovation, which is to represent some data columns with fixed value ranges, or bands. When considering features, it is shown that some of the data can be classified directly through fixed value ranges, while the rest must be classified using a classifier technique and the idea allows the paper to discuss a biological analogy with neurons and neuron links. Tests show that the method can successfully classify a diverse set of benchmark datasets to better than the state-of-the-art.