Multiclass classification

In machine learning and statistical classification, multiclass classification or multinomial classification is the problem of classifying instances into one of three or more classes (classifying instances into one of two classes is called binary classification). For example, deciding on whether an image is showing a banana, peach, orange, or an apple is a multiclass classification problem, with four possible classes (banana, peach, orange, apple), while deciding on whether an image contains an apple or not is a binary classification problem (with the two possible classes being: apple, no apple).

While many classification algorithms (e.g., decision trees, k-NN, neural networks and multinomial logistic regression) naturally permit the use of more than two classes, some are by nature binary algorithms (e.g., classical binary support vector machine) and require decomposition strategies such as one-vs-all, one-vs-one, or ECOC to solve multiclass problems.

Multiclass classification should not be confused with multi-label classification, where multiple labels are to be predicted for each instance (e.g., predicting that an image contains both an apple and an orange, in the previous example).