FEATURE SELECTION FOR CHINESE CHARACTER RECOGNITION BASED ON INDUCTIVE LEARNING

Abstract

Feature selection is a difficult but important issue in the field of machine learning and pattern recognition. In this paper, features for Chinese character recognition are selected by using inductive learning algorithms. The existing inductive learning method based on extension matrix requires precise consistency between positive example and negative example sets, which is very difficult to maintain in most practical cases. The traditional decision tree algorithm ID3 considers only the performance of the discriminating power while selecting features. However, in actual practice the consideration of the associated cost of feature extraction may become a significant concern. In addressing these problems we propose a modified extension matrix approach to select feature subset from the training example set with noises. A decision tree algorithm based on information gain and cost evaluation is also proposed to facilitate cost consideration. The comparative experiments show that the proposed algorithms perform better than the existing inductive learning algorithms to a certain extent.