On Discriminative vs. Generative Classifiers: A Comparison of Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes

Abstract

We compare discriminative and generative learning as typified by logistic regression and naive Bayes. We show, contrary to a widely(cid:173) held belief that discriminative classifiers are almost always to be preferred, that there can often be two distinct regimes of per(cid:173) formance as the training set size is increased, one in which each algorithm does better. This stems from the observation- which is borne out in repeated experiments- that while discriminative learning has lower asymptotic error, a generative classifier may also approach its (higher) asymptotic error much faster.

Cite

Text

Ng and Jordan. "On Discriminative vs. Generative Classifiers: A Comparison of Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2001.

Markdown

[Ng and Jordan. "On Discriminative vs. Generative Classifiers: A Comparison of Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2001.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2001/ng2001neurips-discriminative/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ng2001neurips-discriminative,
  title     = {{On Discriminative vs. Generative Classifiers: A Comparison of Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes}},
  author    = {Ng, Andrew Y. and Jordan, Michael I.},
  booktitle = {Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2001},
  pages     = {841-848},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2001/ng2001neurips-discriminative/}
}