Decoding design based on posterior probabilities in Ternary Error-Correcting Output Codes

Ternary Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC), which can unify most of the state-of-the-art decomposition frameworks such as one-versus-one, one-versus-all, sparse coding, dense coding, etc., is considered more flexible to model multiclass classification problems than Binary ECOC. Meanwhile, there are many corresponding decoding strategies that have been proposed for Ternary ECOC in earlier literatures. Note that there is few working by posterior probabilities, which can be considered as a Bayes decision rule and hence obtain a better performance in usual. Passerini et al. (2004) [16] have recently proposed a decoding strategy based on posterior probabilities. However, according to the analyses of this paper, Passerini et al.'s (2004) [16] method suffers some defects and result in bias. To overcome that, we proposed a variation of it by refining the decomposition process of probability to get smoother estimates. Our bias-variance analysis shows that the decrease in error by our variant is due to a decrease in variance. Besides, we extended an efficient method of obtaining posterior probabilities based on the linear rule for decoding process in Binary ECOC to Ternary ECOC. On ten benchmark datasets, we observe that the two decoding strategies based on posterior probabilities in this paper obtain better performance than other ones in earlier references.