Handle data that belongs to classes not seen in training or testing

There’s been some theoretical work in this area under the name of open set recognition and open world recognition.

Open-set recognition(introduced formally in here) is a topic in Computer Vision whose goal is to train a model which is able to recognize a set of known classes with high accuracy and is also able to recognize when an unknown class is shown to the model.

Open-world recognition(introduced formally here) is an extension to open-set recognition and aims to recognize unknown classes, as well as help label them and then retrain the original model to recognize the new classes.

A recent survey on open-set recognition lists common approaches and discusses future directions for the topic.

One basic way to do it is to train a one-class SVM which recognizes each individual class and the ensemble of SVMs predicts whether the class is known or unknown

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