Pairwise Costs in Multiclass Perceptrons

A novel loss function to train a net of K single-layer perceptrons (KSLPs) is suggested, where pairwise misclassification cost matrix can be incorporated directly. The complexity of the network remains the same; a gradient´s computation of the loss function does not necessitate additional calculations. Minimization of the loss requires a smaller number of training epochs. Efficacy of cost-sensitive methods depends on the cost matrix, the overlap of the pattern classes, and sample sizes. Experiments with real-world pattern recognition (PR) tasks show that employment of novel loss function usually outperforms three benchmark methods.