Possibilistic Classifiers for Uncertain Numerical Data

PSerr&al004International audienceIn many real-world problems, input data may be pervaded with uncertainty. Naive possibilistic classifiers have been proposed as a counterpart to Bayesian classifiers to deal with classification tasks in presence of uncertainty. Following this line here, we extend possibilistic classifiers, which have been recently adapted to numerical data, in order to cope with uncertainty in data representation. We consider two types of uncertainty: i) the uncertainty associated with the class in the training set, which is modeled by a possibility distribution over class labels, and ii) the imprecision pervading attribute values in the testing set represented under the form of intervals for continuous data. We first adapt the possibilistic classification model, previously proposed for the certain case, in order to accommodate the uncertainty about class labels. Then, we propose an extension principle-based algorithm to deal with imprecise attribute values. The experiments reported show the interest of possibilistic classifiers for handling uncertainty in data. In particular, the probability-to-possibility transform-based classifier shows a robust behavior when dealing with imperfect data