Multiclass Support Vector Machines With Example-Dependent Costs Applied to Plankton Biomass Estimation

In many applications, the mistakes made by an automatic classifier are not equal, they have different costs. These problems may be solved using a cost-sensitive learning approach. The main idea is not to minimize the number of errors, but the total cost produced by such mistakes. This brief presents a new multiclass cost-sensitive algorithm, in which each example has attached its corresponding misclassification cost. Our proposal is theoretically well-founded and is designed to optimize cost-sensitive loss functions. This research was motivated by a real-world problem, the biomass estimation of several plankton taxonomic groups. In this particular application, our method improves the performance of traditional multiclass classification approaches that optimize the accuracy.