mlbench (version 1.0-1)

LetterRecognition: Letter Image Recognition Data

Description

The objective is to identify each of a large number of black-and-white rectangular pixel displays as one of the 26 capital letters in the English alphabet. The character images were based on 20 different fonts and each letter within these 20 fonts was randomly distorted to produce a file of 20,000 unique stimuli. Each stimulus was converted into 16 primitive numerical attributes (statistical moments and edge counts) which were then scaled to fit into a range of integer values from 0 through 15. We typically train on the first 16000 items and then use the resulting model to predict the letter category for the remaining 4000. See the article cited below for more details.

Usage

data(LetterRecognition)

Arguments

format

A data frame with 20,000 observations on 17 variables, the first is a factor with levels A-Z, the remaining 16 are numeric.

rll{ [,1] lettr capital letter [,2] x.box horizontal position of box [,3] y.box vertical position of box [,4] width width of box [,5] high height of box [,6] onpix total number of on pixels [,7] x.bar mean x of on pixels in box [,8] y.bar mean y of on pixels in box [,9] x2bar mean x variance [,10] y2bar mean y variance [,11] xybar mean x y correlation [,12] x2ybr mean of $x^2 y$ [,13] xy2br mean of $x y^2$ [,14] x.ege mean edge count left to right [,15] xegvy correlation of x.ege with y [,16] y.ege mean edge count bottom to top [,17] yegvx correlation of y.ege with x }

source

  • Creator: David J. Slate
  • Odesta Corporation; 1890 Maple Ave; Suite 115; Evanston, IL 60201
  • Donor: David J. Slate (dave@math.nwu.edu) (708) 491-3867
These data have been taken from the UCI Repository Of Machine Learning Databases at
  • ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/machine-learning-databases
  • http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/MLRepository.html
and were converted to R format by Friedrich.Leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at.

References

P. W. Frey and D. J. Slate (Machine Learning Vol 6/2 March 91): "Letter Recognition Using Holland-style Adaptive Classifiers".

The research for this article investigated the ability of several variations of Holland-style adaptive classifier systems to learn to correctly guess the letter categories associated with vectors of 16 integer attributes extracted from raster scan images of the letters. The best accuracy obtained was a little over 80%. It would be interesting to see how well other methods do with the same data.