Patent ID: 7373332

Claim:
A method for predicting performance of a classifier in printed circuit assembly fabrication, the method comprising: receiving a training data set relating to good and defective joints in a printed circuit assembly; sorting the training data set into a sorted training data set according to one or more first criteria based at least in part on temporal ordering; choosing a plurality of teaching subsets and a corresponding plurality of testing subsets, the teaching subsets being of approximately equal first predetermined size comprising first adjacent members of the sorted training data set, and the testing subsets being of approximately equal second predetermined size comprising at least one member from the sorted training data set that is temporally subsequent to all members of its corresponding one or more teaching subsets; training a corresponding plurality of classifiers for classifying good and defective joints with respective ones of the teaching subsets; classifying members of the corresponding testing subsets using the corresponding classifiers; comparing classifications assigned to members of the corresponding testing subsets to corresponding true classifications of the corresponding members to generate one or more performance estimates; and generating a prediction of performance of the a classifier trained using a sliding window into the training data of approximately the first predetermined size using the performance estimates.