Extrapolating Expected Accuracies for Large Multi-Class Problems

12/27/2017

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by   Charles Zheng, et al.

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The difficulty of multi-class classification generally increases with the number of classes. Using data from a subset of the classes, can we predict how well a classifier will scale with an increased number of classes? Under the assumptions that the classes are sampled identically and independently from a population, and that the classifier is based on independently learned scoring functions, we show that the expected accuracy when the classifier is trained on k classes is the (k-1)st moment of a certain distribution that can be estimated from data. We present an unbiased estimation method based on the theory, and demonstrate its application on a facial recognition example.