Bit Error Recovery in ECOC Systems through LDPC Codes

Error Correcting Output Coding (ECOC) is a widely used and successful technique that implements a classification system by splitting a multiclass problem into a set of dichotomies according to a coding matrix. In this paper we propose a new approach for the ECOC systems based on a well-known family of error correcting codes in the Coding Theory: the Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes. The goal is twofold: first, to introduce a new coding strategy for determining the code words to be collected in a coding matrix. Second, to exploit the algebraic properties of LDPC codes for recovering the bit errors in the output word and increasing the performance of the classification system. We compare the proposed technique with other commonly used coding strategies on some benchmark data sets achieving very interesting results.