Ten More Years of Error Rate Research

The assessment of the performance of supervised classification rules by estimating their error rate (the proportion of objects misclassified) is an important area of work in statistical pattern recognition. This paper reviews the last ten years of error rate research, bringing up to date the reviews of Hand (1986a) and McLachlan (1987). Since those surveys were published, old estimators have been improved new estimators have been introduced, and new approaches to error rate estimation have been developed. Some of this work has led to deep insights into classification methodology and statistical modelling in general.