AN EVALUATION OF SMOOTHED CLASSIFICATION ERROR-RATE ESTIMATORS

This article examines the properties of smoothed estimators of the probabilities of misclassification in linear discriminant analysis and compares them with those of the resubstitution, leave-one-out, and bootstrap estimators. Smoothed estimators are found to have smaller variance than the other estimators and bias that is a function of the amount of smoothing. An algorithm is presented for determining a reasonable level of smoothing as a function of the training sample sizes and the number of dimensions in the observation vector. Using the criterion of unconditional mean squared error, this particular smoothed estimator, called the NS method, appears to offer a reasonable alternative to existing nonparametric estimators.