CNN for ordinal classification

Question

How do we design a CNN for ordinal classification?
I am trying to analyze plant leaf images for diseases. I've got the disease type classification working. Now we need to classify the magnitude of the disease affliction on a scale of 1 to 10 (ordinal scale), where 1 is almost no trace of diseased parts on the leaf and 10 is completely diseased.

Is it possible to construct a CNN for this task?

How do I deal with the imbalance in training samples for each ordinal level?

Uri Goren · Answer

NN aren't ideal for regression tasks.

I'd train 10 networks, one for each magnitude.

CNN #k would be a binary classifier predicting whether the magnitude is k or less

In other words, CNN #10 is a function that always returns 1, and CNN#0 is the binary classifier you've already trained.

Fadi Bakoura · Answer

Use the same model you trained for the classification task, and append it with 10 logistic units which indicates respectively whether if the magnitude is k or less, as previously suggested.

As for the imbalance problem, you could pick your batch examples to have equal probability for all the classes.

An intuitive explanation:

Class A contains 10 examples while class B contains 90 examples.
duplicate each example of the class A eight times, and then shuffle both classes examples, then during training, keep sampling from a uniform distribution.

Of course, you don't need to duplicate the example data explicitly, just keep a list of indices mapped to your input vectors and start duplicating from there.

CNN for ordinal classification

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