학술논문

On Measures of Uncertainty in Classification
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing IEEE Trans. Signal Process. Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on. 71:3710-3725 2023
Subject
Signal Processing and Analysis
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Uncertainty
Measurement uncertainty
Entropy
Standards
Predictive models
Data models
Bayes methods
Classification
uncertainty
evaluation measure
categorical distribution
geometry-based uncertainty
homophily-based uncertainty
Language
ISSN
1053-587X
1941-0476
Abstract
Uncertainty is unavoidable in classification tasks and might originate from data (e.g., due to noise or wrong labeling), or the model (e.g., due to erroneous assumptions, etc). Providing an assessment of uncertainty associated with each outcome is of paramount importance in assessing the reliability of classification algorithms, especially on unseen data. In this work, we propose two measures of uncertainty in classification. One of the measures is developed from a geometrical perspective and quantifies a classifier's distance from a random guess. In contrast, the second proposed uncertainty measure is homophily-based since it takes into account the similarity between the classes. Accordingly, it reflects the type of mistaken classes. The proposed measures are not aggregated, i.e., they provide an uncertainty assessment to each data point. Moreover, they do not require label information. Using several datasets, we demonstrate the proposed measures’ differences and merit in assessing uncertainty in classification. The source code is available at github.com/pioui/uncertainty.