Analytical study of the optimal combination of binary classifiers based on classifiers-induced partitioning of the training set
Authors: Jean-Marc Brossier, Olivier Lafitte
Organizations: CNRS, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble-INP, GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France. · Universit´e Sorbonne Paris Nord, LAGA, UMR 7539. IRL CNRS-CRM 3457. Universit´e de Montr´eal. Canada.
Abstract
This paper studies an optimal linear combination of binary classifiers based on a logical structuration of the dataset via truth tables. The given classifiers partition data into equivalence classes, allowing for a rigorous analysis of the convexified empirical risk through a multidimensional generalization of classification calibrated functions. We establish sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the (global) point of minimum of the convexified empirical risk for any list of classifiers (when the number of classifiers is large, there frequently could be no point of minimum). In the case of three classifiers, our analysis allows to list all the configurations leading to either a unique solution, infima or non-unique points of minimum. Furthermore, we derive explicit analytical formulae for optimal weights using Exponential (Boost) and Logistic (Logit) loss functions, bypassing iterative optimization. The stability of the resulting classifier and the analysis of data quality can be evaluated through the introduction of the notion of φ-frontiers.
We examine the concentration of uniform generalization errors around their expectation in binary linear classification problems via an isoperimetric argument. In particular, we establish Poincaré and log-Sobolev inequalities for the joint distribution of the output labels and the label-weighted input vectors, which we apply to derive concentration bounds. The derived results improve upon existing bounds obtained from general unbounded empirical processes, as well as that tailored specifically to logistic regression. In asymptotic analysis, we also show that almost sure convergence of uniform generalization errors to their expectation occurs in very broad settings, such as proportionally high-dimensional regimes. Using this convergence, we establish uniform laws of large numbers under dimension-free conditions.
We consider the problem of constructing a K-class classifier from the combination of O(logK) simple binary classifiers -- this is a natural paradigm to construct a sophisticated classifier in a distributed manner with each agent performing a relatively straightforward task. We study the fundamental performance limits of such a classifier when the corresponding binary classifiers are hyperplanes. For a stylized Gaussian setting where the K class centers are independent Gaussian points in Rd and the observations are corrupted by Gaussian noise, we derive explicit performance bounds across several decoding and dimensional regimes. Extensive simulation experiments provide strong empirical validation of the presented theoretical results.
Ioannis Papageorgiou, Srinivas Nomula, Ayalvadi Ganesh +2
We propose a unified algebraic framework for classification performance evaluation that encompasses binary, multiclass, multilabel, ordinal, hierarchical, cost-sensitive, and soft-label settings within a single formalism. The foundation is a representation of actual and predicted labels as binary indicator matrices, combined with three aggregation operators -- global, column-wise, and row-wise -- that correspond exactly to micro, macro/weighted, and exemplar averaging. Any binary performance measure expressed in terms of true/positive/negative counts extends automatically to all settings by substituting these operators, generating multiclass and multilabel versions without measure-specific derivations. The framework further accommodates soft classifier outputs via argmax or thresholding, soft ground truth via triangular norms, ordinal classification via membership functions or cumulative encodings, and cost-sensitive evaluation via a cost matrix that subsumes MAE and MSE as special cases. We establish several theoretical results: micro-averaging equals denominator-weighted macro-averaging; the product t-norm is the unique one preserving the confusion-matrix partition; skew-invariant measures are characterised as functions of recall and specificity; and micro-precision, micro-recall, and micro-F1 are all equal to accuracy in multiclass settings. Empirical illustrations on synthetic and real data confirm the theoretical findings.