Pattern recognition with new class discovery

Classification problems with non-mutually exclusive classes are discussed. A method, new class discovery (NCD), is proposed which can discover potentially unknown or untrained classes. It is formally proved that, in the non-mutually exclusive case, the error probability of the NCD method is less than the conventional classification method using Bayes´s rule. Application of the method to real entomological data was successful: a species was discovered that had been independently verified by taxonomists