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Better Classifier Calibration for Small Datasets

Published: 13 May 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Classifier calibration does not always go hand in hand with the classifier’s ability to separate the classes. There are applications where good classifier calibration, i.e., the ability to produce accurate probability estimates, is more important than class separation. When the amount of data for training is limited, the traditional approach to improve calibration starts to crumble. In this article, we show how generating more data for calibration is able to improve calibration algorithm performance in many cases where a classifier is not naturally producing well-calibrated outputs and the traditional approach fails. The proposed approach adds computational cost but considering that the main use case is with small datasets this extra computational cost stays insignificant and is comparable to other methods in prediction time. From the tested classifiers, the largest improvement was detected with the random forest and naive Bayes classifiers. Therefore, the proposed approach can be recommended at least for those classifiers when the amount of data available for training is limited and good calibration is essential.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data  Volume 14, Issue 3
June 2020
381 pages
ISSN:1556-4681
EISSN:1556-472X
DOI:10.1145/3388473
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 May 2020
Online AM: 07 May 2020
Accepted: 01 February 2020
Revised: 01 January 2020
Received: 01 July 2019
Published in TKDD Volume 14, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Calibration
  2. overfitting
  3. small datasets

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Cited By

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  • (2024)On application of machine learning classifiers in evaluating liquefaction potential of civil infrastructureInterpretable Machine Learning for the Analysis, Design, Assessment, and Informed Decision Making for Civil Infrastructure10.1016/B978-0-12-824073-1.00015-0(205-227)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2022)Machine Learning Experiments with Artificially Generated Big Data from Small Immunotherapy Datasets2022 21st IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA)10.1109/ICMLA55696.2022.00165(986-991)Online publication date: Dec-2022
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