A simple and fast multi-class piecewise linear pattern classifier

Abstract

A simple and fast multi-class piecewise linear classifier is proposed and implemented. For a pair of classes, the piecewise linear boundary is a collection of segments of hyperplanes created as perpendicular bisectors of line segments linking centroids of the classes or parts of classes. For a multi-class problem, a binary partition tree is initially created which represents a hierarchical division of given pattern classes into groups, with each non-leaf node corresponding to some group. After that, a piecewise linear boundary is constructed for each non-leaf node of the partition tree as for a two-class problem. The resulting piecewise linear boundary is a set of boundaries corresponding to all non-leaf nodes of the tree. The basic data structures of algorithms of synthesis of a piecewise linear classifier and classification of unknown patterns are described. The proposed classifier is compared with a number of known pattern classifiers by benchmarking with the use of real-world data sets. (c) 2006 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.