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Main Authors: Yang, Zijian, Eminyan, Vahe, Schlüter, Ralf, Ney, Hermann
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15977
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author Yang, Zijian
Eminyan, Vahe
Schlüter, Ralf
Ney, Hermann
author_facet Yang, Zijian
Eminyan, Vahe
Schlüter, Ralf
Ney, Hermann
contents In statistical classification and machine learning, classification error is an important performance measure, which is minimized by the Bayes decision rule. In practice, the unknown true distribution is usually replaced with a model distribution estimated from the training data in the Bayes decision rule. This substitution introduces a mismatch between the Bayes error and the model-based classification error. In this work, we apply classification error bounds to study the relationship between the error mismatch and the Kullback-Leibler divergence in machine learning. Motivated by recent observations of low model-based classification errors in many machine learning tasks, bounding the Bayes error to be lower, we propose a linear approximation of the classification error bound for low Bayes error conditions. Then, the bound for class priors are discussed. Moreover, we extend the classification error bound for sequences. Using automatic speech recognition as a representative example of machine learning applications, this work analytically discusses the correlations among different performance measures with extended bounds, including cross-entropy loss, language model perplexity, and word error rate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_15977
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Classification Error Bound for Low Bayes Error Conditions in Machine Learning
Yang, Zijian
Eminyan, Vahe
Schlüter, Ralf
Ney, Hermann
Machine Learning
In statistical classification and machine learning, classification error is an important performance measure, which is minimized by the Bayes decision rule. In practice, the unknown true distribution is usually replaced with a model distribution estimated from the training data in the Bayes decision rule. This substitution introduces a mismatch between the Bayes error and the model-based classification error. In this work, we apply classification error bounds to study the relationship between the error mismatch and the Kullback-Leibler divergence in machine learning. Motivated by recent observations of low model-based classification errors in many machine learning tasks, bounding the Bayes error to be lower, we propose a linear approximation of the classification error bound for low Bayes error conditions. Then, the bound for class priors are discussed. Moreover, we extend the classification error bound for sequences. Using automatic speech recognition as a representative example of machine learning applications, this work analytically discusses the correlations among different performance measures with extended bounds, including cross-entropy loss, language model perplexity, and word error rate.
title Classification Error Bound for Low Bayes Error Conditions in Machine Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15977