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

Efficient Asymmetric Co-Tracking using Uncertainty Sampling

Adaptive tracking-by-detection approaches are popular for tracking arbitrary objects. They treat the tracking problem as a classification task and use online learning techniques to update the object model. However, these approaches are heavily invested in the efficiency and effectiveness of their detectors. Evaluating a massive number of samples for each frame (e.g., obtained by a sliding window) forces the detector to trade the accuracy in favor of speed. Furthermore, misclassification of borderline samples in the detector introduce accumulating errors in tracking. In this study, we propose a co-tracking based on the efficient cooperation of two detectors: a rapid adaptive exemplar-based detector and another more sophisticated but slower detector with a long-term memory. The sampling labeling and co-learning of the detectors are conducted by an uncertainty sampling unit, which improves the speed and accuracy of the system. We also introduce a budgeting mechanism which prevents the unbounded growth in the number of examples in the first detector to maintain its rapid response. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed tracker against its baselines and its superior performance against state-of-the-art trackers on various benchmark videos.Comment: Submitted to IEEE ICSIPA'201

Structured Learning via Logistic Regression

A successful approach to structured learning is to write the learning objective as a joint function of linear parameters and inference messages, and iterate between updates to each. This paper observes that if the inference problem is "smoothed" through the addition of entropy terms, for fixed messages, the learning objective reduces to a traditional (non-structured) logistic regression problem with respect to parameters. In these logistic regression problems, each training example has a bias term determined by the current set of messages. Based on this insight, the structured energy function can be extended from linear factors to any function class where an "oracle" exists to minimize a logistic loss.Comment: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 201

Efficient Diverse Ensemble for Discriminative Co-Tracking

Ensemble discriminative tracking utilizes a committee of classifiers, to label data samples, which are in turn, used for retraining the tracker to localize the target using the collective knowledge of the committee. Committee members could vary in their features, memory update schemes, or training data, however, it is inevitable to have committee members that excessively agree because of large overlaps in their version space. To remove this redundancy and have an effective ensemble learning, it is critical for the committee to include consistent hypotheses that differ from one-another, covering the version space with minimum overlaps. In this study, we propose an online ensemble tracker that directly generates a diverse committee by generating an efficient set of artificial training. The artificial data is sampled from the empirical distribution of the samples taken from both target and background, whereas the process is governed by query-by-committee to shrink the overlap between classifiers. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional ensemble trackers on public benchmarks.Comment: CVPR 2018 Submissio