Search

This article introduces a double pruning algorithm that can be used to reduce the storage requirements, speed-up the classification process and improve the performance of parallel ensembles. A key element in the design of the algorithm is the estimation of the class label that the ensemble assigns to a given test instance by polling only a fraction of its classifiers. Instead of applying this form of dynamical (instance-based) pruning to the original ensemble, we propose to apply it to a subset of classifiers selected using standard ensemble pruning techniques. The pruned subensemble is built by first modifying the order in which classifiers are aggregated in the ensemble and then selecting the first classifiers in the ordered sequence. Experiments in benchmark problems illustrate the improvements that can be obtained with this technique. Specifically, using a bagging ensemble of 101 CART trees as a starting point, only the 21 trees of the pruned ordered ensemble need to be stored in memory. Depending on the classification task, on average, only 5 to 12 of these 21 classifiers are queried to compute the predictions. The generalization performance achieved by this double pruning algorithm is similar to pruned ordered bagging and significantly better than standard bagging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that the provisional count of votes of an ensemble of classifiers can be used to estimate the probability that the final ensemble prediction coincides with the current majority class. For a given instance, querying can be stopped when this probability is above a specified threshold. This instance-based ensemble pruning procedure can be efficiently implemented if these probabilities are pre-computed and stored in a lookup table. However, the size of the table and the cost of computing the probabilities grow very rapidly with the number of classes of the problem. In this article we introduce a number of computational optimizations that can be used to make the construction of the lookup table feasible. As a result, the application of instance-based ensemble pruning is extended to multi-class problems. Experiments in several UCI multi-class problems show that instance-based pruning speeds-up classification by a factor between 2 and 10 without any significant variation in the prediction accuracy of the ensemble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comprehensive study of different ensemble pruning techniques applied to a bagging ensemble composed of decision stumps. Six different ensemble pruning methods are tested. Four of these are greedy strategies based on first reordering the elements of the ensemble according to some rule that takes into account the complementarity of the predictors with respect to the classification task. Subensembles of increasing size are then constructed by incorporating the ordered classifiers one by one. A halting criterion stops the aggregation process before the complete original ensemble is recovered. The other two approaches are selection techniques that attempt to identify optimal subensembles using either genetic algorithms or semidefinite programming. Experiments performed on 24 benchmark classification tasks show that the selection of a small subset (≈ 10 − 15%) of the original pool of stumps generated with bagging can significantly increase the accuracy and reduce the complexity of the ensemble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on decision tree pruning[1] has brought to the attention of the machine learning community the fact that, in classification problems, the use of subadditive penalties in cost-complexity pruning has a stronger theoretical basis than the usual additive penalty terms. We implement cost-complexity pruning algorithms with general size-dependent penalties to confirm the results of[1] . Namely, that the family of pruned subtrees selected by pruning with a subadditive penalty of increasing strength is a subset of the family selected using additive penalties. Consequently, this family of pruned trees is unique, it is nested and it can be computed efficiently. However, in spite of the better theoretical grounding of cost-complexity pruning with subadditive penalties, we found no systematic improvements in the generalization performance of the final classification tree selected by cross-validation using subadditive penalties instead of the commonly used additive ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the properties of ensembles of neural networks, in which each network in the ensemble is constructed using a perturbed version of the training data. The perturbation consists in switching the class labels of a subset of training examples selected at random. Experiments on several UCI and synthetic datasets show that these class-switching ensembles can obtain improvements in classification performance over both individual networks and bagging ensembles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]