Neural network classification and prior class probabilities

A commonly encountered problem in MLP (multi-layer perceptron) classification problems is related to the prior probabilities of the individual classes - if the number of training examples that correspond to each class varies significantly between the classes, then it may be harder for the network to learn the rarer classes in some cases. Such practical experience does not match theoretical results which show that MLPs approximate Bayesian a posteriori probabilities (independent of the prior class probabilities). Our investigation of the problem shows that the difference between the theoretical and practical results lies with the assumptions made in the theory (accurate estimation of Bayesian a posteriori probabilities requires the network to be large enough, training to converge to a global minimum, infinite training data, and the a priori class probabilities of the test set to be correctly represented in the training set). Specifically, the problem can often be traced to the fact that efficient MLP training mechanisms lead to sub-optimal solutions for most practical problems. In this chapter, we demonstrate the problem, discuss possible methods for alleviating it, and introduce new heuristics which are shown to perform well on a sample ECG classification problem. The heuristics may also be used as a simple means of adjusting for unequal misclassification costs.