Confidence Measures for Neural Network Classifiers
Résumé
Neural Networks are commonly used in classification and decision tasks. In this paper, we focus on the problem of the local confidence of their results. We review some notions from statistical decision theory that offer an insight on the determination and use of confidence measures for classification with Neural Networks. We then present an overview of the existing confidence measures and finally propose a simple measure which combines the benefits of the probabilistic interpretation of network outputs and the estimation of the quality of the model by bootstrap error estimation. We discuss empirical results on a real-world application and an artificial problem and show that the simplest measure behaves often better than more sophisticated ones, but may be dangerous under certain situations.