Uncertainty estimation using fuzzy measures for multiclass classification.

Uncertainty arises in classification problems when the input pattern is not perfect or measurement error is unavoidable. In many applications, it would be beneficial to obtain an estimate of the uncertainty associated with a new observation and its membership within a particular class. Although statistical classification techniques base decision boundaries according to the probability distributions of the patterns belonging to each class, they are poor at supplying uncertainty information for new observations. Previous research has documented a multiarchitecture, monotonic function neural network model for the representation of uncertainty associated with a new observation for two-class classification. This paper proposes a modification to the monotonic function model to estimate the uncertainty associated with a new observation for multiclass classification. The model, therefore, overcomes a limitation of traditional classifiers that base decisions on sharp classification boundaries. As such, it is believed that this method will have advantages for applications such as biometric recognition in which the estimation of classification uncertainty is an important issue. This approach is based on the transformation of the input pattern vector relative to each classification class. Separate, monotonic, single-output neural networks are then used to represent the "degree-of-similarity" between each input pattern vector and each class. An algorithm for the implementation of this approach is proposed and tested with publicly available face-recognition data sets. The results indicate that the suggested approach provides similar classification performance to conventional principle component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) techniques for multiclass pattern recognition problems as well as providing uncertainty information caused by misclassification.