  In this paper we introduce a new classification algorithm called Optimization
of Distributions Differences (ODD). The algorithm aims to find a transformation
from the feature space to a new space where the instances in the same class are
as close as possible to one another while the gravity centers of these classes
are as far as possible from one another. This aim is formulated as a
multiobjective optimization problem that is solved by a hybrid of an
evolutionary strategy and the Quasi-Newton method. The choice of the
transformation function is flexible and could be any continuous space function.
We experiment with a linear and a non-linear transformation in this paper. We
show that the algorithm can outperform 6 other state-of-the-art classification
methods, namely naive Bayes, support vector machines, linear discriminant
analysis, multi-layer perceptrons, decision trees, and k-nearest neighbors, in
12 standard classification datasets. Our results show that the method is less
sensitive to the imbalanced number of instances comparing to these methods. We
also show that ODD maintains its performance better than other classification
methods in these datasets, hence, offers a better generalization ability.
