How does OneVsRestClassifier work internally?

Updated May 17, 2026

Short answer

It trains one binary classifier per class against all other classes.

Deep explanation

OneVsRestClassifier decomposes a multi-class problem into multiple binary classification tasks. For each class, it treats that class as positive and all others as negative. At inference time, it selects the class with the highest score. This approach is simple, scalable, and widely used in linear models and SVMs.

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