A Comparative Analysis of Ensemble Classifiers: Case Studies in Genomics

The combination of multiple classifiers using ensemble methods is increasingly important for making progress in a variety of difficult prediction problems. We present a comparative analysis of several ensemble methods through two case studies in genomics, namely the prediction of genetic interactions and protein functions, to demonstrate their efficacy on real-world datasets and draw useful conclusions about their behavior. These methods include simple aggregation, meta-learning, cluster-based meta-learning, and ensemble selection using heterogeneous classifiers trained on resampled data to improve the diversity of their predictions. We present a detailed analysis of these methods across 4 genomics datasets and find the best of these methods offer statistically significant improvements over the state of the art in their respective domains. In addition, we establish a novel connection between ensemble selection and meta-learning, demonstrating how both of these disparate methods establish a balance between ensemble diversity and performance.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 8 tables, to appear in Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Data Minin

Popular Ensemble Methods: An Empirical Study

An ensemble consists of a set of individually trained classifiers (such as neural networks or decision trees) whose predictions are combined when classifying novel instances. Previous research has shown that an ensemble is often more accurate than any of the single classifiers in the ensemble. Bagging (Breiman, 1996c) and Boosting (Freund and Shapire, 1996; Shapire, 1990) are two relatively new but popular methods for producing ensembles. In this paper we evaluate these methods on 23 data sets using both neural networks and decision trees as our classification algorithm. Our results clearly indicate a number of conclusions. First, while Bagging is almost always more accurate than a single classifier, it is sometimes much less accurate than Boosting. On the other hand, Boosting can create ensembles that are less accurate than a single classifier -- especially when using neural networks. Analysis indicates that the performance of the Boosting methods is dependent on the characteristics of the data set being examined. In fact, further results show that Boosting ensembles may overfit noisy data sets, thus decreasing its performance. Finally, consistent with previous studies, our work suggests that most of the gain in an ensemble's performance comes in the first few classifiers combined; however, relatively large gains can be seen up to 25 classifiers when Boosting decision trees

Application of bagging, boosting and stacking to intrusion detection

This paper investigates the possibility of using ensemble algorithms to improve the performance of network intrusion detection systems. We use an ensemble of three different methods, bagging, boosting and stacking, in order to improve the accuracy and reduce the false positive rate. We use four different data mining algorithms, naïve bayes, J48 (decision tree), JRip (rule induction) and iBK( nearest neighbour), as base classifiers for those ensemble methods. Our experiment shows that the prototype which implements four base classifiers and three ensemble algorithms achieves an accuracy of more than 99% in detecting known intrusions, but failed to detect novel intrusions with the accuracy rates of around just 60%. The use of bagging, boosting and stacking is unable to significantly improve the accuracy. Stacking is the only method that was able to reduce the false positive rate by a significantly high amount (46.84%); unfortunately, this method has the longest execution time and so is insufficient to implement in the intrusion detection fiel

A comparative study of the ensemble and base classifiers performance in Malay text categorization

Automatic text categorization (ATC) has attracted the attention of the research community over the last decade as it frees organizations from the need of manually organized documents. The ensemble techniques, which combine the results of a number of individually trained base classifiers, always improve classification performance better than base classifiers. This paper intends to compare the effectiveness of ensemble with that of base classifiers for Malay text classification. Two feature selection methods (the Gini Index (GI) and Chi-square) with the ensemble methods are applied to examine Malay text classification, with the intention to efficiently integrate base classifiers algorithms into a more accurate classification procedure. Two types of ensemble methods, namely the voting combination and meta-classifier combination, are evaluated. A wide range of comparative experiments are conducted to assess classified Malay dataset. The applied experiments reveal that meta-classifier ensemble framework performed better than the best individual classifiers on the tested datasets

Comparative study of standalone classifier and ensemble classifier

Ensemble learning is one of machine learning method that can solve performance measurement problem. Standalone classifiers often show a poor performance result, thus why combining them with ensemble methods can improve their performance scores. Ensemble learning has several methods, in this study, three methods of ensemble learning are compared with standalone classifiers of support vector machine, Naïve Bayes, and decision tree. bagging, AdaBoost, and voting are the ensemble methods that are combined then compared to standalone classifiers. From 1670 dataset of twitter mentions about tourist’s attraction, ensemble methods did not show a specific improvement in accuracy and precision measurement since it generated the same result as decision tree as standalone classifier. Bagging method showed a significant development in recall, f-measure, and area under curve (AUC) measurement. For overall performance, decision tree as standalone classifier and decision tree with AdaBoost method have the highest score for accuracy and precision measurements, meanwhile support vector machine with bagging method has the highest score for recall, f-measure, and AUC