A unifying approach on bias and variance analysis for classification

Cemre Zor; Terry Windeatt

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arXiv · 2101.01765

A unifying approach on bias and variance analysis for classification

Cemre Zor·Terry Windeatt

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Abstract

Standard bias and variance (B&V) terminologies were originally defined for the regression setting and their extensions to classification have led to several different models / definitions in the literature. In this paper, we aim to provide the link between the commonly used frameworks of Tumer & Ghosh (T&G) and James. By unifying the two approaches, we relate the B&V defined for the 0/1 loss to the standard B&V of the boundary distributions given for the squared error loss. The closed form relationships provide a deeper understanding of classification performance, and their use is demonstrated in two case studies.

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Cemre Zor, Terry Windeatt. 2021-01-05. A unifying approach on bias and variance analysis for classification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.01765

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