Most pattern classifiers have been designed based on the ML (Maximum Likelihood) training algorithm which is simple and relatively powerful. The ML training is an efficient algorithm to individually estimate the model parameters of each class under the assumption that all class models in a classifier are statistically independent. That assumption, however, is not valid in many real situations, which degrades the performance of the classifier. In this paper, we propose a minimum-error-rate training algorithm based on the MAP (Maximum a Posteriori) approach. The algorithm regards the normalized outputs of the classifier as estimates of the a posteriori probability, and tries to maximize those estimates. According to Bayes decision theory, the proposed algorithm satisfies the condition of minimum-error-rate classificatin. We apply this algorithm to NPM (Neural Prediction Model) for speech recognition, and derive new disrminative training algorithms. Experimental results on ten Korean digits recognition have shown the reduction of 37.5% of the number of recognition errors.