A systematic comparison of supervised classifiers

Pattern recognition techniques have been employed in a myriad of industrial, medical, commercial and academic applications. To tackle such a diversity of data, many techniques have been devised. However, despite the long tradition of pattern recognition research, there is no technique that yields the best classification in all scenarios. Therefore, the consideration of as many as possible techniques presents itself as an fundamental practice in applications aiming at high accuracy. Typical works comparing methods either emphasize the performance of a given algorithm in validation tests or systematically compare various algorithms, assuming that the practical use of these methods is done by experts. In many occasions, however, researchers have to deal with their practical classification tasks without an in-depth knowledge about the underlying mechanisms behind parameters. Actually, the adequate choice of classifiers and parameters alike in such practical circumstances constitutes a long-standing problem and is the subject of the current paper. We carried out a study on the performance of nine well-known classifiers implemented by the Weka framework and compared the dependence of the accuracy with their configuration parameter configurations. The analysis of performance with default parameters revealed that the k-nearest neighbors method exceeds by a large margin the other methods when high dimensional datasets are considered. When other configuration of parameters were allowed, we found that it is possible to improve the quality of SVM in more than 20% even if parameters are set randomly. Taken together, the investigation conducted in this paper suggests that, apart from the SVM implementation, Weka's default configuration of parameters provides an performance close the one achieved with the optimal configuration

Beta-trees: Multivariate histograms with confidence statements

Multivariate histograms are difficult to construct due to the curse of dimensionality. Motivated by $k$-d trees in computer science, we show how to construct an efficient data-adaptive partition of Euclidean space that possesses the following two properties: With high confidence the distribution from which the data are generated is close to uniform on each rectangle of the partition; and despite the data-dependent construction we can give guaranteed finite sample simultaneous confidence intervals for the probabilities (and hence for the average densities) of each rectangle in the partition. This partition will automatically adapt to the sizes of the regions where the distribution is close to uniform. The methodology produces confidence intervals whose widths depend only on the probability content of the rectangles and not on the dimensionality of the space, thus avoiding the curse of dimensionality. Moreover, the widths essentially match the optimal widths in the univariate setting. The simultaneous validity of the confidence intervals allows to use this construction, which we call {\sl Beta-trees}, for various data-analytic purposes. We illustrate this by using Beta-trees for visualizing data and for multivariate mode-hunting