How Complex Is Your Classification Problem?

By Ana Carolina Lorena, Luís Paulo Faina Garcia, Jens Lehmann, M. D. Souto, Tin Kam Ho. 2018

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Characteristics extracted from the training datasets of classification problems have proven to be effective predictors in a number of meta-analyses. Among them, measures of classification complexity can be used to estimate the difficulty in separating the data points into their expected classes. Descriptors of the spatial distribution of the data and estimates of the shape and size of the decision boundary are among the known measures for this characterization. This information can support the formulation of new data-driven pre-processing and pattern recognition techniques, which can in turn be focused on challenges highlighted by such characteristics of the problems. This article surveys and analyzes measures that can be extracted from the training datasets to characterize the complexity of the respective classification problems. Their use in recent literature is also reviewed and discussed, allowing to prospect opportunities for future work in the area. Finally, descriptions are given on an R package named Extended Complexity Library (ECoL) that implements a set of complexity measures and is made publicly available.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence

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Citations in the corpus

On Class Orderings for Incremental Learning (2020, methodology): “In our case, we could use a known measure (Lorena et al., 2019), or the one proposed in (Nguyen et al.”