Sampling of Virtual Examples to Improve Classification Accuracy for Nominal Attribute Data

摘要

This paper presents a method of using virtual examples to improve the classification accuracy for data with nominal attributes. Most of the previous researches on virtual examples focused on data with numeric attributes, and they used domain-specific knowledge to generate useful virtual examples for a particularly targeted learning algorithm. Instead of using domain-specific knowledge, our method samples virtual examples from a naieve Bayesian network constructed from the given training set. A sampled example is considered useful if it contributes to the increment of the network's conditional likelihood when added to the training set. A set of useful virtual examples can be collected by repeating this process of sampling followed by evaluation. Experiments have shown that the virtual examples collected this way can help various learning algorithms to derive classifiers of improved accuracy.