In decision making systems involving multiple classifiers there is the need to assess classifier (in)congruence, that is to gauge the degree of agreement between their outputs. A commonly used measure for this purpose is the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. We propose a variant of the KL divergence, named decision cognizant Kullback-Leibler divergence (DC-KL), to reduce the contribution of the minority classes, which obscure the true degree of classifier incongruence. We investigate the properties of the novel divergence measure analytically and by simulation studies. The proposed measure is demonstrated to be more robust to minority class clutter. Its sensitivity to estimation noise is also shown to be considerably lower than that of the classical KL divergence. These properties render the DC-KL divergence a much better statistic for discriminating between classifier congruence and incongruence in pattern recognition systems.

We applied several regression and deep learning methods to predict fluid intelligence scores from T1-weighted MRI scans as part of the ABCD Neurocognitive Prediction Challenge (ABCD-NP-Challenge) 2019. We used voxel intensities and probabilistic tissue-type labels derived from these as features to train the models. The best predictive performance (lowest mean-squared error) came from Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR; λ = 10), which produced a mean-squared error of 69.7204 on the validation set and 92.1298 on the test set. This placed our group in the fifth position on the validation leader board and first place on the final (test) leader board.

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In pattern recognition, disagreement between two classifiers regarding the predicted class membership of an observation can be indicative of an anomaly and its nuance. Since, in general, classifiers base their decisions on class a posteriori probabilities, the most natural approach to detecting classifier incongruence is to use divergence. However, existing divergences are not particularly suitable to gauge classifier incongruence. In this paper, we postulate the properties that a divergence measure should satisfy and propose a novel divergence measure, referred to as delta divergence. In contrast to existing measures, it focuses on the dominant (most probable) hypotheses and, thus, reduces the effect of the probability mass distributed over the non dominant hypotheses (clutter). The proposed measure satisfies other important properties, such as symmetry, and independence of classifier confidence. The relationship of the proposed divergence to some baseline measures, and its superiority, is shown experimentally.

Abstract. Two-class supervised learning in the context of a classifier ensemble may be formulated as learning an incompletely specified Boolean function, and the associated Walsh coefficients can be estimated without knowledge of the unspecified patterns. Using an extended version of the Tumer-Ghosh model, the relationship between Added Classification Error and second order Walsh coefficients is established. In this paper, the ensemble is composed of Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) base classifiers, with the number of hidden nodes and epochs systematically varied. Experiments demonstrate that the mean second order coefficients peak at the same number of training epochs as ensemble test error reaches a minimum.