classifyScalarNoLink doesn't exist yet, it was a proposed addition to mirror the classifyNoLink (vector form), so it won't hurt any existing classifiers. 'score' was a proposed name for it.
I was concerned about classifyScalar because it enforces the contract that the scores be in the 0..1 range. There doesn't seem to be a function that returns the raw score for the scalar case. @Ted, there is a throw new UnsupportedOperationException in the AbstractVectorClassifier.java's implementation of classifyNoLink, which implies that all classifiers must support classify but do not have to support classifyNoLink. I was proposing that we have all classifiers support classifyNoLink as well, especially for the case of non-probabilistic based ones where reducing scores to probabilities would be bad. Here's a concrete example. Suppose we make a generic program to load any abstract vector classifier to plot the precision recall curves for the binary case. If we use classifyScalar exclusively some classifiers would have distorted curves due to pushing them through an exponent first. However if they all support classifyScalarNoLink we could give the users an option of picking a threshold for their desired recall in the raw score space, without the added distortion introduced by forcing the scores in the 0..1 range. Hope that helps. By the way, it seems I'm approaching machine learning from a rather different point of view (empirical loss minimization that indirectly try to minimize 0-1 loss rather than the probabilistic approach), which is why enforcing probabilities on them don't make much sense. On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Dmitriy Lyubimov <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:44 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> > wrote: > > score is a reasonable name. classifiyScalarNoLink is fairly descriptive > if > > you > > know the jargon, but score may be better. One problem I have is that > people > > are already using this code in production so name changes are a bit > painful. > > > > +1 yes please don't change if no good reason > -- Yee Yang Li Hector http://hectorgon.blogspot.com/ (tech + travel) http://hectorgon.com (book reviews)
