Publication Date

5-2019

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Technical Report: UTEP-CS-19-46

Abstract

Machine learning techniques have been very efficient in many applications, in particular, when learning to classify a given object to one of the given classes. Such classification problems are ubiquitous: e.g., in medicine, such a classification corresponds to diagnosing a disease, and the resulting tools help medical doctors come up with the correct diagnosis. There are many possible ways to set up the corresponding neural network (or another machine learning technique). A direct way is to design a single neural network with as many outputs as there are classes -- so that for each class i, the system would generate a degree of confidence that the given object belongs to this class. Instead of designing a single neural network, we can follow a hierarchical approach corresponding to a natural hierarchy of classes: classes themselves can usually be grouped into a few natural groups, each group can be subdivided into subgroups, etc. So, we set up several networks: the first classifies the object into one of the groups, then another one classifies it into one of the subgroups, etc., until we finally get the desired class. From the computational viewpoint, this hierarchical scheme seems to be too complicated: why do it if we can use a direct approach? However, surprisingly, in many practical cases, the hierarchical approach works much better. In this paper, we provide a possible explanation for this unexpected phenomenon.

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