MULTICLASS CLASSIFICATION BASED ON META PROBABILITY CODES

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach to improve multiclass classification performance by employing Stacked Generalization structure and One-Against-One decomposition strategy. The proposed approach encodes the outputs of all pairwise classifiers by implicitly embedding two-class discriminative information in a probabilistic manner. The encoded outputs, called Meta Probability Codes (MPCs), are interpreted as the projections of the original features. It is observed that MPC, compared to the original features, has more appropriate features for clustering. Based on MPC, we introduce a cluster-based multiclass classification algorithm, called MPC-Clustering. The MPC-Clustering algorithm uses the proposed approach to project an original feature space to MPC, and then it employs a clustering scheme to cluster MPCs. Subsequently, it trains individual multiclass classifiers on the produced clusters to complete the procedure of multiclass classifier induction. The performance of the proposed algorithm is extensively evaluated on 20 datasets from the UCI machine learning database repository. The results imply that MPC-Clustering is quite efficient with an improvement of 2.4% overall classification rate compared to the state-of-the-art multiclass classifiers.