Multi-class to Binary reduction of Large-scale classification Problems

In the context of large-scale problems, traditional multiclass classification approaches have to deal with class imbalancement and complexity issues which make them inoperative in some extreme cases. In this talk we present a transformation that reduces the initial multiclass classification of examples into a binary classification of pairs of examples and classes. We present generalization error bounds that exhibit the interdependency between the pairs of examples and which recover known results on binary classification with i.i.d. data. We show the efficiency of the deduced algorithm compared to state-of-the-art multiclass classification strategies on two large-scale document collections especially in the interesting case where the number of classes becomes very large.