Statistical approaches to combining binary classifiers for multi-class classification

Abstract

One of the popular methods for multi-class classification is to combine binary classifiers. In this paper, we propose a new approach for combining binary classifiers. Our method trains a combining method of binary classifiers using statistical techniques such as penalized logistic regression, stacking, and a sparsity promoting penalty. Our approach has several advantages. Firstly, our method outperforms existing methods even if the base classifiers are well-tuned. Secondly, an estimate of conditional probability for each class can be naturally obtained. Furthermore, we propose selecting relevant binary classifiers by adding the group lasso type penalty in training the combining method.