# How to improve classification performance based on multiple known classification results

I am working on a classification problem, which may contains a unknown number of data classes, typically 5-50 classes in each sample. I had several classification algorithms, each gives me a classification output based on a given sample. However, these classification outputs are almost unlikely to agree with each other completely.

When I looked into these classification results, I noticed that there always exists a better classification output in a subset of a given sample. This means that I shall be able to get a better classification output if I can use these existing classification outputs properly. However, the problem is I do not know how to do this job.

So far, what I have is 500 manually annotated sample data, and corresponding classification results for these training data. Is there any simple way that I can train a system to automatically form a new classification output for me?

Another thing that bothered me is that I am completely lost in formulating my task in mathematics. I know my following description is problematic, please help me to correct it.

Suppose we have a training sample composed of $m$ 2D data points $\Omega =\{d_1,d_2,\cdots,d_m\}$ with a corresponding known label set $C_{\rm gt} = \left\{l(d_i|{\rm gt})\big|i\in\Omega\right\}$, where $l(d_i|{\rm{gt}})=k$ means the label of data point $d_i$ is of the $k$th class in ground truth (gt). Assume I have $n$ classification algorithms $A_1(\cdot),\cdots,A_n(\cdot)$ and each takes the entire dataset as input and generates a classification result $C_j = \left\{l(d_i|A_j)\big|i\in\Omega\right\}$, which is the label collection for all data points using algorithm $A_j$. And my objective is to find a function $A_{new}=f(A_1,\cdots,A_j)$ such that $$A_{new} = \arg\min_{f(\cdot)}\sum_{i\in\Omega}\left\|l(d_i|A_{new})-l(d_i|\rm{gt})\right\|.$$

This is some formulation that I learnt in signal estimation, but in this problem a label is quite different from a random variable: 1) it is discrete rather than continuous 2) even if one algorithm assigns a label $k'$ to a data point which is marked as class $k$ in the groundtruth, it does not necessarily mean it is wrong, because what we really care about is whether the $k$th class in the groundtruth has been marked as one single class in our output, and we do not care about which label it used in the output.

Finally, I have no idea how to construct a function $f(\cdot)$.

• I changed "clustering" to "classification" in your question. Will you mind? Jul 28 '13 at 5:23
• Classification can be needed if the ultimate decisions need to be made instantly with no user input regarding utilities (loss/cost function). Is that your setting? Otherwise a risk model may be more helpful. For one thing, risk estimates provide a "grey zone". Apr 27 '14 at 12:54