In applications where categorical labels follow a natural hierarchy, classification methods that exploit the label structure often outperform those that do not. Un-fortunately, the majority of classification datasets do not come pre-equipped with a hierarchical structure and classical flat classifiers must be employed. In this paper, we investigate a class of methods that induce a hierarchy that can similarly improve classification performance over flat classifiers. The class of methods follows the structure of first clustering the conditional distributions and subsequently using a hierarchical classifier with the induced hierarchy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the class of methods both for discovering a latent hierarchy and for improving accuracy in principled simulation settings and three real data applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In applications where categorical labels follow a natural hierarchy, classification methods that exploit the label structure often outperform those that do not. Un-fortunately, the majority of classification datasets do not come pre-equipped with a hierarchical structure and classical flat classifiers must be employed. In this paper, we investigate a class of methods that induce a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13556],"msr-publication-type":[193715],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[246694,252976,249568,248083,246691,252979,248776,252967,252970,246685,252973],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-732043","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-artificial-intelligence","msr-field-of-study-categorical-variable","msr-field-of-study-classification-methods","msr-field-of-study-cluster-analysis","msr-field-of-study-computer-science","msr-field-of-study-conditional-probability-distribution","msr-field-of-study-exploit","msr-field-of-study-hierarchical-classifier","msr-field-of-study-hierarchy","msr-field-of-study-machine-learning","msr-field-of-study-multiclass-classification"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2021-2-19","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"Arxiv","msr_volume":"2102.10263","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2102.10263","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Hayden S. 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