Pruning of Error Correcting Output Codes by optimization of accuracy–diversity trade off

Ensemble learning is a method of combining learners to obtain more reliable and accurate predictions in supervised and unsupervised learning. However, the ensemble sizes are sometimes unnecessarily large which leads to additional memory usage, computational overhead and decreased effectiveness. To overcome such side effects, pruning algorithms have been developed; since this is a combinatorial problem, finding the exact subset of ensembles is computationally infeasible. Different types of heuristic algorithms have developed to obtain an approximate solution but they lack a theoretical guarantee. Error Correcting Output Code (ECOC) is one of the well-known ensemble techniques for multiclass classification which combines the outputs of binary base learners to predict the classes for multiclass data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for pruning the ECOC matrix by utilizing accuracy and diversity information simultaneously. All existing pruning methods need the size of the ensemble as a parameter, so the performance of the pruning methods depends on the size of the ensemble. Our unparametrized pruning method is novel as being independent of the size of ensemble. Experimental results show that our pruning method is mostly better than other existing approaches

Upper Facial Action Unit Recognition

This paper concentrates on the comparisons of systems that are used for the recognition of expressions generated by six upper face action units (AUs) by using Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Haar wavelet, Haar-Like and Gabor wavelet coe cients are compared, using Adaboost for feature selection. The binary classi cation results by using Support Vector Machines (SVM) for the upper face AUs have been observed to be better than the current results in the literature, for example 96.5% for AU2 and 97.6% for AU5. In multi-class classi cation case, the Error Correcting Output Coding (ECOC) has been applied. Although for a large number of classes, the results are not as accurate as the binary case, ECOC has the advantage of solving all problems simultaneously; and for large numbers of training samples and small number of classes, error rates are improved

Approximation of Ensemble Boundary Using Spectral Coefficients

IEEE A spectral analysis of a Boolean function is proposed for approximating the decision boundary of an ensemble of classifiers, and an intuitive explanation of computing Walsh coefficients for the functional approximation is provided. It is shown that the difference between the first- and third-order coefficient approximations is a good indicator of optimal base classifier complexity. When combining neural networks, the experimental results on a variety of artificial and real two-class problems demonstrate under what circumstances ensemble performance can be improved. For tuned base classifiers, the first-order coefficients provide performance similar to the majority vote. However, for weak/fast base classifiers, higher order coefficient approximation may give better performance. It is also shown that higher order coefficient approximation is superior to the Adaboost logarithmic weighting rule when boosting weak decision tree base classifiers

Hybrid Correlation and Causal Feature Selection for Ensemble Classifiers

PC and TPDA algorithms are robust and well known prototype algorithms, incorporating constraint-based approaches for causal discovery. However, both algorithms cannot scale up to deal with high dimensional data, that is more than few hundred features. This chapter presents hybrid correlation and causal feature selection for ensemble classifiers to deal with this problem. Redundant features are removed by correlation-based feature selection and then irrelevant features are eliminated by causal feature selection. The number of eliminated features, accuracy, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and false negative rate (FNR) of proposed algorithms are compared with correlation-based feature selection (FCBF and CFS) and causal based feature selection algorithms (PC, TPDA, GS, IAMB)