Classification and Representation

Classification

To attempt classification, one method is to use linear regression and map all predictions greater than 0.5 as a 1 and all less than 0.5 as a 0. However, this method doesn't work well because classification is not actually a linear function.

The classification problem is just like the regression problem, except that the values we now want to predict take on only a small number of discrete values. For now, we will focus on the binary classification problem in which y can take on only two values, 0 and 1. (Most of what we say here will also generalize to the multiple-class case.) For instance, if we are trying to build a spam classifier for email, then may be some features of a piece of email, and y may be 1 if it is a piece of spam mail, and 0 otherwise. Hence, y∈{0,1}. 0 is also called the negative class, and 1 the positive class, and they are sometimes also denoted by the symbols “-” and “+.” Given x(i), the corresponding is also called the label for the training example.

Hypothesis Representation

We could approach the classification problem ignoring the fact that y is discrete-valued, and use our old linear regression algorithm to try to predict y given x. However, it is easy to construct examples where this method performs very poorly. Intuitively, it also doesn’t make sense for hθ(x) to take values larger than 1 or smaller than 0 when we know that y ∈ {0, 1}. To fix this, let’s change the form for our hypotheses hθ(x) to satisfy. This is accomplished by plugging into the Logistic Function.

Our new form uses the "Sigmoid Function," also called the "Logistic Function":

The following image shows us what the sigmoid function looks like:

The function g(z), shown here, maps any real number to the (0, 1) interval, making it useful for transforming an arbitrary-valued function into a function better suited for classification.

hθ(x) will give us the probability that our output is 1. For example, hθ(x)=0.7 gives us a probability of 70% that our output is 1. Our probability that our prediction is 0 is just the complement of our probability that it is 1 (e.g. if probability that it is 1 is 70%, then the probability that it is 0 is 30%).

Decision Boundary

In order to get our discrete 0 or 1 classification, we can translate the output of the hypothesis function as follows:

The way our logistic function g behaves is that when its input is greater than or equal to zero, its output is greater than or equal to 0.5:

Remember.

So if our input to g is , then that means:

From these statements we can now say:

The decision boundary is the line that separates the area where y = 0 and where y = 1. It is created by our hypothesis function.

Example:

Multiclass Classification: One-vs-all

Now we will approach the classification of data when we have more than two categories. Instead of y = {0,1} we will expand our definition so that y = {0,1...n}.

Since y = {0,1...n}, we divide our problem into n+1 (+1 because the index starts at 0) binary classification problems; in each one, we predict the probability that 'y' is a member of one of our classes.

The following image shows how one could classify 3 classes:We are basically choosing one class and then lumping all the others into a single second class. We do this repeatedly, applying binary logistic regression to each case, and then use the hypothesis that returned the highest value as our prediction.

To summarize: