Subclasses

It frequently happens that the classes defined by the end user are not the "natural" classes. For example, while the goal in classifying English letters might be just to decide on one of 26 categories, if both upper-case and lower-case letters will be encountered, it might make more sense to treat them separately and to build a 52-category classifier, OR-ing the outputs at the end. Of course, it is not always so obvious that there are distinct subclasses.

Solution: Use a clustering procedure to find subclasses in the data, and treat each subclass as a distinct class. (We treat clustering in another section of this course.)

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