English

Unimodal probability distributions for deep ordinal classification

Machine Learning 2017-06-23 v2

Abstract

Probability distributions produced by the cross-entropy loss for ordinal classification problems can possess undesired properties. We propose a straightforward technique to constrain discrete ordinal probability distributions to be unimodal via the use of the Poisson and binomial probability distributions. We evaluate this approach in the context of deep learning on two large ordinal image datasets, obtaining promising results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.05278,
  title  = {Unimodal probability distributions for deep ordinal classification},
  author = {Christopher Beckham and Christopher Pal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.05278},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication for ICML2017. This is the camera-ready version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:47:23.119Z