Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 6 (NIPS 1993)
Tal Grossman, Alan Lapedes
We show how randomly scrambling the output classes of various fractions of the training data may be used to improve predictive accuracy of a classification algorithm. We present a method for calculating the "noise sensitivity signature" of a learning algorithm which is based on scrambling the output classes. This signature can be used to indicate a good match between the complexity of the classifier and the complexity of the data. Use of noise sensitivity signatures is distinctly different from other schemes to avoid over(cid:173) training, such as cross-validation, which uses only part of the train(cid:173) ing data, or various penalty functions, which are not data-adaptive. Noise sensitivity signature methods use all of the training data and are manifestly data-adaptive and non-parametric. They are well suited for situations with limited training data.