Conditional Random Field

Conditional Random Field

Conditional random fields (CRFs) are a class of statistical modelling method often applied in pattern recognition and machine learning, where they are used for structured prediction. Whereas an ordinary classifier predicts a label for a single sample without regard to "neighboring" samples, a CRF can take context into account; e.g., the linear chain CRF popular in natural language processing predicts sequences of labels for sequences of input samples.

CRFs are a type of discriminative undirected probabilistic graphical model. It is used to encode known relationships between observations and construct consistent interpretations. It is often used for labeling or parsing of sequential data, such as natural language text or biological sequences and in computer vision. Specifically, CRFs find applications in shallow parsing, named entity recognition and gene finding, among other tasks, being an alternative to the related hidden Markov models. In computer vision, CRFs are often used for object recognition and image segmentation.