An ordinal data method for the classification with reject option

Abstract

In this work we consider the problem of binary classification where the classifier may abstain instead of classifying each observation, leaving the critical items for human evaluation. This article motivates and presents a novel method to learn the reject region on complex data. Observations are replicated and then a single binary classifier determines the decision plane. The proposed method is an extension of a method available in the literature for the classification of ordinal data. Our method is compared with standard techniques on synthetic and real datasets, emphasizing the advantages of the proposed approach.