Bayesian and Decision Tree Approaches for Pattern Recognition Including Feature Measurement Costs

The minimum cost classifier when general cost functions are associated with the tasks of feature measurement and classification is formulated as a decision graph which does not reject class labels at intermediate stages. Noting its complexities, a heuristic procedure to simplify this scheme to a binary decision tree is presented. The optimization of the binary tree in this context is carried out using dynamic programming. This technique is applied to the voiced-unvoiced-silence classification in speech processing.