Talk:Confusion matrix
Merger
I suggest this article should be merged at this address with Table of confusion. The issue is the same and there should be only one article in order to avoid confusion //end of lame joke//. --Ben T/C 15:46, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
I don not support this change of name. "Confusion matrix" has been used for ever in Speech Recognition, and in some other Pattern Recognition tasks, although I cannot trace the ancestry of the use. For instance, some fairly standard sequence recognition toolkits like HTK have tools specifically designed to obtain this "confusion matrix".
I do grant you that most of the times what we see is a table (specially if reading it from paper), and I guess that the "table of confusion" stuff comes from statistics and people who developed their field before computers even existed.
In communications we call a related diagram a ROC (Receiver_operating_characteristic), each of whose working points is a table of confusion. I suggest "table of confusion" goes in there and "confusion matrix" is improved. --FJValverde 09:24, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
Geography
Just to futher confuse things, confusion matrices arnt soely used in AI (as this article would suggest). A confusion matric is also used in Earth Observation when validating thematic classifications.
Yes, I believe AI is too narrow in this discussion. I suggest "Pattern Recognition" is the actual context where confusion matrices makes sense. FJValverde 09:01, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
I think they are used more generally in statistics, be it for pattern recognition or earth observation. --Ben T/C 07:41, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Er... In my very limited historical view of either statistics and PR, the latter actually sprung from the former, but has since gained some independence: not all techniques in PR are statistical (or even probabilistic). However, I think that confusion matrix is properly a PR concept in the sense that a n-to-m classifier is a very basic PR task. In this sense earth observation and "thematic classification" (meaning classifying the type of soil & such based on the images taken by satellites, right?) is strictly a type of PR task. --FJValverde 08:47, 22 June 2007 (UTC)