KEYWORDS: Platinum, Matrices, Picosecond phenomena, Information theory, Binary data, Nickel, Monte Carlo methods, Detection and tracking algorithms, Iron, Classification systems
Multi-class assignment is often used to aid in the exploitation of data in the Intelligence, Surveillance, and
Reconnaissance (ISR) community. For example, tracking systems collect detections into tracks and recognition systems
classify objects into various categories. The reliability of these systems is highly contingent upon the correctness of the
assignments. Conventional methods and metrics for evaluating assignment correctness only convey partial information
about the system performance and are usually tied to the specific type of system being evaluated. Recently, information
theory has been successfully applied to the tracking problem in order to develop an overall performance evaluation
metric. In this paper, the information-theoretic framework is extended to measure the overall performance of any multiclass
assignment system, specifically, any system that can be described using a confusion matrix. The performance is
evaluated based upon the amount of truth information captured and the amount of false information reported by the
system. The information content is quantified through conditional entropy and mutual information computations using
numerical estimates of the association probabilities. The end result is analogous to the Receiver Operating Characteristic
(ROC) curve used in signal detection theory. This paper compares these information quality metrics to existing metrics
and demonstrates how to apply these metrics to evaluate the performance of a recognition system.
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