Dual objective bounded abstaining model to control performance for safety-critical applications

Abstaining models have been widely used in safety-critical fields to avoid uncertain classification and reduce misclassification costs. Previous abstaining models have two main disadvantages. First, the costs of classification and rejection need to be set. Unfortunately, it is difficult to obtain or estimate costs in practical applications. When costs change, the trained model will be no longer applicable. Second, a single indicator, such as the error rate or AUC, is optimized, which has poor robustness for different application requirements. To solve such problems, a dual objective bounded abstaining (DOBA) model is proposed. DOBA optimizes the binary confusion matrix with rejection by minimizing the false positive and negative rates under class-specific reject constraints. The DOBA model is solved using an evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithm. The requirement-oriented abstaining classifier can be selected from a set of Pareto-optimal solutions. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness and superiority of DOBA compared to other abstaining models.