A hierarchical classification method using belief functions

Classification is one of the most important tasks carried out by intelligent systems. Recent works have proposed deep learning to solve the classification problem. While such techniques achieve a very good performance and reduce the complexity of feature engineering, they require a large amount of data and are extremely computationally expensive to train. This paper presents a new supervised confidence-based classification method for multi-class problems. The method is a hierarchical technique using the belief function theory and feature selection. The method predicts, for a new sample input, a confidence-level for each class. For this purpose, a hierarchical clustering approach is adopted to create a two-level classification problem. A feature selection technique is then carried out at each level to reduce the complexity of the algorithm and enhance the classification performance. The belief function theory is then used to combine all information and to give out decisions, by computing the confidence of the sample being in each class. The proposed method has been tested for indoor localization in a wireless sensors network and for facial image recognition using well-known databases. The obtained results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method and its competence as compared to state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.