Practical Machine Learning Cookbook

An overview of structured prediction

Structured prediction is an important area of application for machine learning problems in a variety of domains. Considering an input x and an output y in areas such as a labeling of time steps, a collection of attributes for an image, a parsing of a sentence, or a segmentation of an image into objects, problems are challenging because the y's are exponential in the number of output variables that comprise it. These are computationally challenging because prediction requires searching an enormous space, and also statistical considerations, since learning accurate models from limited data requires reasoning about commonalities between distinct structured outputs. Structured prediction is fundamentally a problem ...