Category Utility - Insensitivity of Category Utility To Ordinality

Insensitivity of Category Utility To Ordinality

Like the mutual information, the category utility is not sensitive to any ordering in the feature or category variable values. That is, as far as the category utility is concerned, the category set {small,medium,large,jumbo} is not qualitatively different than the category set {desk,fish,tree,mop} since the formulation of the category utility does not account for any ordering of the class variable. Similarly, a feature variable adopting values {1,2,3,4,5} is not qualitatively different from a feature variable adopting values {fred,joe,bob,sue,elaine}. As far as the category utility or mutual information are concerned, all category and feature variables are nominal variables. For this reason, category utility does not reflect any gestalt aspects of "category goodness" that might be based on such ordering effects. One possible adjustment for this insensitivity to ordinality is given by the weighting scheme described in the article for mutual information.