Piecewise linear classifiers with an appropriate number of hyperplanes

Abstract A new method to construct a piecewise linear classifier is proposed. This method selects an appropriate number of hyperplanes of a piecewise linear classifier by MDL (Minimum Description Length) criterion. This method constructs the hyperplanes so as to keep the local error rate for a training set under a threshold. The threshold is determined automatically by the MDL criterion so as to avoid overfitting of the classifier to the training set. This method showed results better than those of a previous method in some experiments.