The present invention recites a method and computer program product for
identifying one or more new pattern classes and incorporating the classes
into a pattern recognition classifier as output classes. A plurality of
input patterns determined not to be associated with any of a set of at
least one represented output class by a pattern recognition classifier
are rejected. The rejected pattern samples are then grouped into clusters
according to the similarities between the pattern samples. Clusters that
represent new pattern classes are identified via independent review. The
classifier is then retrained to include the new pattern classes as output
classes.