Binary classification

Binary classification is the task of classifying the elements of a set into two groups (each called class) on the basis of a classification rule. Typical binary classification problems include: Medical testing to determine if a patient has certain disease or not; Quality control in industry, deciding whether a specification has been met; In information retrieval, deciding whether a page should be in the result set of a search or not. Binary classification is dichotomization applied to a practical situation. In many practical binary classification problems, the two groups are not symmetric, and rather than overall accuracy, the relative proportion of different types of errors is of interest. For example, in medical testing, detecting a disease when it is not present (a false positive) is considered differently from not detecting a disease when it is present (a false negative). Statistical classification is a problem studied in machine learning. It is a type of supervised learning, a method of machine learning where the categories are predefined, and is used to categorize new probabilistic observations into said categories. When there are only two categories the problem is known as statistical binary classification. Some of the methods commonly used for binary classification are: Decision trees Random forests Bayesian networks Support vector machines Neural networks Logistic regression Probit model Genetic Programming Multi expression programming Linear genetic programming Each classifier is best in only a select domain based upon the number of observations, the dimensionality of the feature vector, the noise in the data and many other factors. For example, random forests perform better than SVM classifiers for 3D point clouds. Evaluation of binary classifiers There are many metrics that can be used to measure the performance of a classifier or predictor; different fields have different preferences for specific metrics due to different goals. In medicine sensitivity and specificity are often used, while in information retrieval precision and recall are preferred.