couple is used to link class-probability estimates produced by pairwise coupling in multi-class classification problems.
couple(probin, coupler ="minpair")
Arguments
probin: The pairwise coupled class-probability estimates
coupler: The type of coupler to use. Currently minpar and pkpd and vote are supported (see reference for more details). If vote is selected the returned value is a primitive estimate passed on given votes.
Details
As binary classification problems are much easier to solve many techniques exist to decompose multi-class classification problems into many binary classification problems (voting, error codes, etc.). Pairwise coupling (one against one) constructs a rule for discriminating between every pair of classes and then selecting the class with the most winning two-class decisions. By using Platt's probabilities output for SVM one can get a class probability for each of the k(k−1)/2 models created in the pairwise classification. The couple method implements various techniques to combine these probabilities.
Returns
A matrix with the resulting probability estimates.
References
Ting-Fan Wu, Chih-Jen Lin, ruby C. Weng
Probability Estimates for Multi-class Classification by Pairwise Coupling